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When you say "competing", do you mean the category page and homepage are close together in the SERPs or just optimized for the same keyword? Did you intentionally optimize the homepage for that keyword?

It all comes down to which page is truly more relevant to the search query. For example, let's pretend you and your competitor sell dog accessories (collars, leashes, food, toys, etc). Someone searching for "dog leashes" would much rather land on your page for "dog leashes" rather than your homepage or your competitor's homepage since it puts them on exactly what they were looking for (rather than having to navigate their way from your homepage to the dog leashes page). Make sense?

Also, assuming your category page is intended to outrank your homepage for that keyword, you wouldn't be competing with your homepage unless it is ranking higher than your category page. Having your homepage ranking for that same keyword is only an issue if it appears before your category page in the SERPs.

Hope that helps!

Hi all,

The current roadmap for our Eng team has us performing a site migration (redirecting one subfolder to another subfolder) and then a domain migration shortly after. The way I see it, I have 2 scenarios (the 1st involves the site migration THEN the domain migration and the 2nd is the site migration and domain migration being done simultaneously):

1. olddomain.com/subfolder-old to olddomain.com/subfolder-new THEN olddomain.com/subfolder-new to newdomain.com/subfolder-new AND olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new

2. olddomain.com/subfolder-old to newdomain.com/subfolder-new

I also understand that there are two best practices for a domain migration and they are 1) keep everything the same that you can to help Google understand it is the same page, just on a different domain and 2) avoid chain redirects.

As you can imagine, scenario 1 requires more Eng costs than scenario 2. So, my question is, is scenario 2 a perfectly viable option or should I make the push to go for scenario 1?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!