Onsite link structure: potential effects of renaming categories

Hey Guys,

I have a fairly complicated situation, and I'd like some advise on how to approach it. Beware! We're going really "get into it" in this thread, so any advise is greatly appreciated. I have 5-6 key phrases I'm trying to dominate, all of which are fairly low comp. The site in question ranks fairly well on all of the phrases and many similar phrases, but I'm not seeing the kind of domination that the client wants to see. To date, I've optimized a lot of content. Lowered keyword density, corrected meta information, the very basics. Today, I made an interesting discovery:

All of the categories and the content pages within them rank very well for their related phrases. so if the category is called "blue", and I search "(key phrase) blue", it's phrase and most of it's inner content is on the first page. The problem is one of the categories are completely unrelated.

Here's an example:

Nav bar

Home - categories - About - (more "about"-type stuff) - Events - Press - Sitemap

Cat dropdown

cat1 = totally unrelated phrase, cat2, cat3, cat4


All category titles and URL's match. so cat1's URL is thesite/cat-1, and the category page title is "cat 1"


So, I'm wondering If I change the name of (the totally unrelated category) to one of our target phrases, how might that effect seo? what's the potential risk aside from losing the search rank on the unrelated phrase?


additionally, I'm looking for advise on how my nav bar should be structured. I took this project over from a work in progress, so there's no real rhythm to the nav bar other than it does have the category links.

the effects should be evident. You change the categories and the past categories will be 404'd which will return a bad internal linking structure making the site less desirable to good. You would have to create the new categories, move all of the content to the new categories, and then do a 301 redirect.

Yup, I agree. I noticed some of my rankings are just based on the categories. Everything should be related in onsite seo terms.

I understand that. But assuming I follow through with the suggestion, might I encounter any additional adverse effects? I'm not sure what's going on, but it seems like the most minor tweak to even a single page these last two weeks have had large impacts. I'm seeing pages dance 100 spots a day. some are holding stable, others look like: 5, 174, 18, 97, 9, 81 (that's just in a 2 day period). I'm kinda afraid to make such a big move.