Do Parent Categories Hurt SEO?

[2bloggers]

I have parent categories and subcategories. Will it be harder for the subcategories to rank well because they have a parent category? The URL is longer, for one. I am just wondering if I should not have parent categories. I have one category page doing really well and I am trying to boost the others (most of which are subcategories) and this is a concern for me. Thanks!

Edit: I also have a category that has 2 parent categories. I want it automatically in those 2 categories and one of its own. By itself it is very important keyword. Is this ok or should I have it be a parent category?

[BlueprintMarketing]

If you are not getting duplicate content and you are getting decent rankings now I would not worry about categories as much. However if you are being affected by poor rankings or duplicate content I would then eliminate the categories what type of CMS if any are you using?

Here's some information on site structure. I like to use flat however some people believe in silo

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/intelligent-site-structure-for-better-se/

This was written by Yoast as well

I hope this is a help sincerely,

Thomas

[2bloggers]

Well I am only getting decent rankings for one category and it is a parent category. However, I have not optimized the other pages yet so I cannot expect to rank well. I just want to make sure I am building a strong foundation. I am a new blog and want to do things right as well as I can from the beginning.

I am using WordPress.

Thanks for the link!

[BlueprintMarketing]

PS

Here's some more information I hope this help

http://moz.com/ugc/the-effect-of-site-structure-on-organic-traffic-add-categories-ampamp-products

http://moz.com/learn/seo/url

http://moz.com/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

My opinion is to use a flat site structure where

example.com is the homepage

and

example.com/about us is the about us page etc.

I hope this is of help sincerely, Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

Excellent that you're using WordPress. That's a good start

You can get rid of the categories section by using

This fantastic plug-in then clicking the do not show categories

http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

Another tool that his help me a lot to get other pages to write very well is

Scribe content by copy blogger here's some info

http://www.copyblogger.com/scribe-4/

http://scribecontent.com/

If you're able to use HTML5 please do it. The schema will improve your rankings dramatically and the size of your page will shrink dramatically. I would also highly recommend using manage WordPress hosting WP engine, ZippyKid, web synthesis and Pagely.

a managed word press host is all going to help you immensely with word press problems that most hosts will simply tell you I'm sorry your servers up these guys will actually solve the problem for you it is well worth the small extra fee.

The backups, security and site speed would be almost impossible to replicate on other systems for the small price that you pay with these systems.

Here's an honest review from a friend of mine who is using a VPS and had a very fast server in place however now uses manage WordPress hosting

http://www.gregreindel.com/wordpress-hosting-zippykid-giving-it-a-try/

Advanced WordPress SEO and duplicate content

Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/</author-name>, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages _outside_of the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1Noindex, follow archive pages and disable some archives

Using the WordPress SEO plugin, make sure to prevent indexing (or even existence) of archive pages that do not apply for your site. You do this under SEO → Titles & Metas, where you’ll find the following options on the “Other” tab:

The settings above are the settings for my site. As you can see, I’ve completely disabled the date based archives, as I don’t use those. Any date based link will redirect to my homepage because of this setting. I’ve left the author archives untouched, but I have checked a checkbox on the General tab, which makes the subpages of those archives be noindex, follow by default. So you’ll never land on page 2 of an archive on my site from the search engines:

On smaller sites it might make sense to noindex either the category or the tag structure, but in my experience noindexing those on yoast.com does little to no change at all.

There is one type of archive that is noindex,follow by default as well in the WordPress SEO plugin: the search result pages. This is a best practice from Google for which a setting is left out as you should just have that anyway.

A lot has changed in how Google handles paginated archives recently when they introduced their support for rel="next" and rel="prev" links. I’ve written an article about that: rel="next" and rel="prev" for paginated archives, which is a bit too technical to fully list here, but suffice to say my WordPress SEO plugin takes care of _all_the needed changes automatically.

3.2Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use WordPress SEO to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it as I have. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO…

3.3Pagination

Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts…

There’s an easy fix, in fact, there are several plugins that deal with this. My favorite one by far is WP-PageNavi, maintained by Scribu, one of the best WordPress developer around. If you have the Genesis Theme like we do here on Yoast.com, you can just enable numeric navigation under Theme Settings → Content Archives.

3.4Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. WordPress SEO automatically nofollows all your login and registration links, but you really shouldn’t have a login link in your template in most cases.

3.5Canonical

In february 2009, the major search engines introduced the rel="canonical" element. This is another utility to help fight duplicate content. WordPress has built-in support for canonical link elements on single posts and pages, but it has some slight bugs in that. It doesn’t output canonical links on any other page. With my WordPress SEO plugin activated, you automatically get canonical link elements for every page type in WordPress.

4A site structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1Pages instead of posts

You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.

4.2New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!

4.3Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There are quite a few related posts plugins but I tend to stick with the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin or custom code in my own theme. A very good alternative isMicrokid’s related post plugin, which lets you manually pick related posts. This might cost a bit more time before you hit publish but might very well be worth your while.

There are also a lot of plugins that will automatically link certain keywords to certain posts. I do not like this at all as I find it to look very spammy.

http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

I hope this is all talk to you sincerely,

Thomas