I Thought Categories Were Bad....

I'm looking at this site in my niche, it in a competitive niche and the site itself isnt all that powerful. However, it has dominated tons of search queries for 1st and 2nd results in SERPs.

The same posts are ranking for tons of different keywords because of his category titles. (he clearly has categories set as index)

Pretend topic was "shoes"

Hes ranking his post for the actual post/post title: "nike dunks 2.0 review", plus hes also ranking it for "best shoes under $100" because he has that same post in an additional category called "Under $100" category.

So instead of the "duplicate content" crap we here, hes killing 2 keywords with one post this way.

Im now debating if I should be re-indexing my categories and copying this, rather than writing a new page for "best shoes under $100 and wasting my time.

Thoughts on why this is working?

Have you checked his backlink profile? Maybe there are inbound links to his categories? That would explain his success.

Yeah it's funny how some sites act different to others. I find sometimes tags work like a charm. I did a test on a website that was a low competition niche and back links the tag pages, they ranked top of the listings for multiple keywords. I'm not sure if it's as effective for medium to high because all that authority and juice is passed to every post on the page page. Much better to pass it all to one then move to the next.

infoasian said:

Have you checked his backlink profile? Maybe there are inbound links to his categories? That would explain his success.

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I am using moz toolbar, he has no backlinks to category. I assume backlinking to category is kind of stupid anyway.

JournoNick said:

Yeah it's funny how some sites act different to others. I find sometimes tags work like a charm. I did a test on a website that was a low competition niche and back links the tag pages, they ranked top of the listings for multiple keywords. I'm not sure if it's as effective for medium to high because all that authority and juice is passed to every post on the page page. Much better to pass it all to one then move to the next.

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Yea, on another term hes being outdone by a guy who has a PA 30 page with 38 links, but the dude is still in 3rd with categories. The term only gets 200-300 searches, so its not really worth a huge link building effort. If going with a category will get me in third place with no work, id be down.

SEO is like a woman, make no fucking sense

InsanelySane said:

I am using moz toolbar, he has no backlinks to category. I assume backlinking to category is kind of stupid anyway.

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Why would you suggest this being stupid? Just look at ebay to see how well categories work. I have many sites that receive 95% of their organic traffic to categories rather than items or homepage. One can always add unique category intros with metatags to make them attractive.