Client has Messed up On-page SEO with a "tag" page ranking for his main keyword.

Island

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Hey guys,

I have a client ranking on the top of second page for a pretty big keyword that's hyper relevant to him.
However, the page that's ranking is clientsite.com/tag/keyword. He also has a category page that's clientsite.com/category/keyword, and then he has a final post which is clientsite.com/keyword

The 3rd page is where we want the traffic to go.

So I'm thinking just 301 both to the 3rd page.

Anybody know how long it would take for clientsite.com/keyword to start ranking in place of the old page after I 301 it? Do 301 redirects like this go smoothly usually?
 
Btw, I know why marketing pros are so skeptical of Wordpress. You need to know what the heck you're doing otherwise you're going to sabatage your SEO and page speed. I have another guy, whose website had an absurd load time(7-10 seconds) with 50mb page size until I worked on it and got it to under 2 sec page load time. Still pretty high... but slowly getting to something reasonable.
 
The 301 would be a band-aid for the root cause.

If I were me, this what I would do.

First I would compare the pages that rank to the page that I want to rank. In particular I'd look at keyword densities and keyword placement.

I'd look in my sidebar for any site wide links that may be using the keyword.

I would delete all the tags.

I would optimize the category page for a broader term so that it does not compete with the page I want to rank.
 
You can set the meta tags for Tag pages as "noindex, follow" so that they won't appear in the rankings but the spiders will still follow them to crawl and find new pages and flow link juice. You can do the same for category pages if you wish. Just think about what's the best for the site. Tag pages really have no reason to be indexed anyways, unless you've set up custom templates that include unique content about the tag. Even then, you're not achieving your goal of pushing traffic where you want it.

Don't 301 those pages though. It doesn't make sense for humans or bots.

There's a reason Google thinks the tag/category pages are more appropriate for that SERP and this is your chance to figure out why, glean some insight, correct the issue, and use your newfound knowledge on other pages on your site.
 
In the meantime you could also add a call to action to the top of the tag archive pages.

I'm in a different boat because I add unique text to all of my category/tag pages at the top, calls to action, links... A paragraph or two before the dynamic "latest posts"... I'm actively trying to rank my category and tag pages, building links to them...
 
Thanks for the replies.

@Calamari

I did look at the reason why the tag page is ranking. The tag page was linked from the homepage in the sidebar, while the post we want to rank wasn't linked to anywhere from the homepage. Additionally the tag page has a couple more incidences of the keyword itself. Obviously we just fixed the issue with the post and its linked on the homepage sidebar now.

The thorough post on the topic actually has more inbound links than the tag page. IMO its the fact that it wasn't linked on the homepage that did it.

Do you think if I just delete all tags and change the name of the category, the issue would autocorrect and the new post would start ranking on its own?

@Ryuzaki

I think this is the best option. The post we have is far superior in every aspect, while the tag page is worse designed etc. I think the homepage linking to the tag page and not to the post was the reason that page ranked.

@thamonsta

Thanks that's another option. We could simply rework the tags page to convert higher. IMO I'd prefer the other post to rank though.

I think at this point my biggest concern is noindexing/delete the tag page, and not regaining the ranking with the post for whatever reason. This post is literally the best in its niche, but we're competing with a huge number of big brands with guides on the same subject.
 
I'm not familiar enough with your site to answer those specific questions. Sorry.

I noticed you are thinking about making a couple quick changes. If you change more than one thing at a time you won't know what fixed it or what made it worse so that you can undo it. Right now you're throwing darts. Make a single change and see if things improve, get worse, or stay the same. And then make another after you learned from the the first change.
 
Ryuzaki said:
There's a reason Google thinks the tag/category pages are more appropriate for that SERP and this is your chance to figure out why, glean some insight...
Click to expand...

But this is really a part of the pattern. With my new sites, whenever i don't set noindex to tag and category pages, they are indexed the first in more than 50% cases, and stay on the first pages for a long time. Google just love them, for some reason.
 
Golan said:
But this is really a part of the pattern. With my new sites, whenever i don't set noindex to tag and category pages, they are indexed the first in more than 50% cases, and stay on the first pages for a long time. Google just love them, for some reason.
Click to expand...

That's what I'm worried about.

We've added the link to the post from the homepage. But I'm afraid the tag page is still going to rank, and even if we noindex it, the post won't rank nearly as well. So I don't want to do anything that jeopardizes the ranking.

Will play it by ear.

Btw, why does 301'ing the tag page to the post page sound like a bad idea?

Isn't the whole idea behind proper redirects situations like these? Where it makes sense for the user to be redirected to page that actually helps them instead of a generic tag page.
 
Island said:
Btw, why does 301'ing the tag page to the post page sound like a bad idea?

Isn't the whole idea behind proper redirects situations like these? Where it makes sense for the user to be redirected to page that actually helps them instead of a generic tag page.
Click to expand...

For the user, may be, but not for the G. You tell G that they now will land on the tag page, and they are getting prepared to this, and then - bazinga! - they land on a post instead. I'm not sure they'll like it so much.
 
Island said:
Btw, why does 301'ing the tag page to the post page sound like a bad idea?
Click to expand...

Because you're not figuring out the real problem. You're not figuring out why the tag page is ranking instead of the page you want to rank. You're trying to slap a band-aid on it.

The page you want to 301 to may have bigger problems that won't allow it to rank even after you implement the 301.
 
Well I guess it was just not being linked to from the homepage because now the post is ranking instead of the tag page.

Lol sweet, was a lot simpler than expected. That one change took care of it.
 
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