How best to Rank Wordpress Categories

[jwm]

I have an EPN site which uses the auction2post plugin for its content. I have set up a number of categories on the site with a number of a2p posts in each. What I would like to do is rank the categories themselves (since each has decent search volume and the individual posts have limited life as they are deleted when the auction ends).

So for example, if the site was comics.com, I would have categories like

comics.com/category/spiderman_comics
comics.com/category/batman_comics

And want to rank the category spiderman_comics for the term "spiderman comics" etc. Each category would have a reasonably high turnover of posts related to spiderman comics generated by a2p

I have searched around in google but not came across much on ranking categories (in fact it appears to be positively discouraged due to the duplicate content issue).

Is there a good way of doing this that would avoid the dup content issues?

 

[dchuk]

Put some unique content on those category pages is the best I could come up with

 

[Bompa]

I might be wrong, but my understanding of the dup content issue is this:

If someone searches for 'spiderman comics', Google does not want to show
pages that have similar content.

In your case, that would not be an issue because you are not trying to rank
two identical pages for the same query, instead, your two identical pages
would be trying to rank for two different queries: 'spiderman comics' and 'batman_comics'.

Bompa

 

[Bombastic]

Are you saying that you're worried about duplicate content because the category page contains the same content that is on the individual blog entries? I don't know, I usually only optimize the individual entries but I get a lot of organic traffic to the category pages anyway, so I don't think dupe content is much of an issue. Just build backlinks to the category pages with whatever keyword you want to target in the anchor. You're targeting different keywords than you would for the individual posts, so I don't see how duplicate content would be an issue.

 

[Edwin]

Try this, create a page for Spiderman Comics, then 301 the category to the page by using a custom category template.

Check your category id's, locate the category id for your Spiderman Comics category and create a custom category .php file that would look like this this if your Spiderman Comics category id would be 5:

category-5.php

And then include this code inside:

<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: <?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/spiderman-comics" );
?>

Then include some static content on it and optimize your page title, include links to posts made in that category, etc.

 

[jwm]

Are you saying that you're worried about duplicate content because the category page contains the same content that is on the individual blog entries? I don't know, I usually only optimize the individual entries but I get a lot of organic traffic to the category pages anyway, so I don't think dupe content is much of an issue. Just build backlinks to the category pages with whatever keyword you want to target in the anchor. You're targeting different keywords than you would for the individual posts, so I don't see how duplicate content would be an issue.

Yes, pretty much. I use AIOSEO and in the setting for the plugin it recommends no index for your category pages to avoid dup content issues. I am reluctant to turn this off until I understand better the implications of the dup content and how I can mitigate.

Try this, create a page for Spiderman Comics, then 301 the category to the page by using a custom category template.

Check your category id's, locate the category id for your Spiderman Comics category and create a custom category .php file that would look like this this if your Spiderman Comics category id would be 5:

category-5.php

And then include this code inside:


Then include some static content on it and optimize your page title, include links to posts made in that category, etc.

I thought about doing something like this but the problem I have is that I have a lot of categories and posts are being made via a2p hourly. So its a shit load of work to keep the links to the current posts up to date (which sorta defeats the purpose of automating via a2p).

Is there anyway to set this up but have links automatically created (and updated) to each current post in that category?

thanks for all the suggestions to date

 

[Edwin]

Use custom pages also and then replace the loop with this:
Wordpress | Wordpress: display posts from certain category