Does this count as a backlink to my category page?

[dealblogger]

I am ranking high with a certain category page and I am reading that I need backlinks to that page. It is going to be a challenge to get a backlink to that specific category page but how about this?

Category page URL:

www.mysite.com/category/name

Backlink to this URL:

www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post (EDIT: Apparently these types of links don't exist! I went into the category page and clicked on a blog post and it just gave me the www.mysite.com/blah-blah-blah)

Will that count as a backlink to the category page? Right now I am only getting backlinks to these blog posts:

www.mysite.com/this-is-a-blog-post

Any help appreciated!

EDIT: Well I guess now my question is worthless. But if you have any input, it would be appreciated.

[mihaiaperghis]

Hey, let me take a swing at this.

As I understand, you would like to rank with the www.mysite.com/category/name page, and you can get backlinks to your blog posts instead of your category. Your problem is that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post, and you don't know if that counts as a backlink to your category page.

First of all, you're right, getting backlinks to your category page is usually pretty hard, and your best bet is to get backlinks to the blog posts that are featured in that category. This can be efficient especially if your internal linking is sound, so that on the blog post page you link back to the parent category (and not to many other parts of your website).

Second, there is no problem that www.mysite.com/category/name/specific-blog-post redirects to www.mysite.com/specific-blog-post. That's the way you set up your WordPress permalinks, which isn't bad and is actually fairly common. Google doesn't associate the blog post with a category based on URL, it associates them based on the relationships (internal links) it finds while crawling your site. Getting more backlinks to blog posts in one category will pass some value to the category itself, so naturally your category will also rise in ranking.

Hope this helps, cheers!

[dealblogger]

Dang, you are awesome. That helped a lot and I appreciate it. Today I am working on cleaning up my category pages and making sure everything is filed properly. I am really happy to hear that getting backlinks to a blog post in one category will pass value to the category. Thanks!