Wordpress - customers straying to categories

[sussexrob]

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Hi All

Ive got a site which i have had for over a year and makes good money each month but i recon the conversion could be improved greatly but i am after some advise as people keep straying into the categories on the right hand side..grr lol

When i first started it, i was desperate to get out of debt so bulked up the site with content but looks pants as the categories arent really categories. If i was to make it look better, it would alter way to much and might as well start again

What im wondering is, can i remove the categories sidebar and not effect the ranking (does google us the categories to index the content)

Also, if i take the categories away, even just putting a search box, pages links etc it looks terrible. Any ideas? like if i should change the css to be full width

Either way, im fed up with people straying into the categories instead of clicking the images and leaving the site

Cheers

Rob

[fizzbird]

What im wondering is, can i remove the categories sidebar and not effect the ranking (does google us the categories to index the content)

Be careful removing your categories as google may be ranking some of these higher than the pages they relate to. From what you've said, I'm guessing you've let google index the site without any restriction?

You'll benefit long term from not having your categories and archives being indexed but don't just delete them overnight.

[sussexrob]

Cheers Fizzbird

I will leave them there then until my credit cards are gone then i wont care as much

Unfortunaly yeah i did start the site without having them set to no follow, you live and learn eh

cheers for your reply

Rob

[ChristopherB]

You can hide them via css if you don't want your visitors to go through the links.

<div id="categories">
 cat code here.
</div>

Then in the css

#categories {
display: none;
}

just a suggestion if your desperate to stop customers from viewing them but want google still to follow them.

[Stellar]

Then in the css

#categories {
display: none;
}

just a suggestion if your desperate to stop customers from viewing them but want google still to follow them.

Isn't that a bit dangerous? Wouldn't that be considered cloaking? I know Google is not the best at reading CSS, so I'm not sure if they can detect that or not.

[ChristopherB]

Thats why i mentioned if you where desperate.

However hiding categories which in a wordpress site are there by default anyway is in my mind low risk to none. it's quite a different story to place 200 keywords in the header file and hide that.

I'm positive google is smart enough to distinguish between the two. If you do this i would monitor your site in the webmasters tools incase they flag it but highly unlikely unless you have like 25+ categories.

Alternatively,

You could move your categories to your footer to make them less prominent and reduce leakage.

[kolli-tosg]

Are your visitors landing on post pages and then straying or landing on the categories pages?

Is it one main category they stray to or all?

Matt

[channel5]

You can hide them via css if you don't want your visitors to go through the links.

<div id="categories">
 cat code here.
</div>

Then in the css

#categories {
display: none;
}

just a suggestion if your desperate to stop customers from viewing them but want google still to follow them.

You'll risk getting deindexed for cloaking.. i would not suggest doing this.

[sussexrob]

Cheers everyone

The customers are landing on the front page as i have it setup as static

It holds all the images of the items for that merchant but alot are straying looking at the categories instead of clicking on the images and going through to the merchant. Crude, but thats how i set it up when i first got into affiliate marketing

Very little land on post pages

Cheers again all

Rob

[kolli-tosg]

Three reasons why they may be straying:

1. They can’t find what they came to your site for.
2. They are browsing.
3. Navigation is too dominant on pages.

Have you looked at how they get to your site and if that content is on the page when they get to it? and is that content the navigation text?

Can you add links to the aff links to the pseudo category pages? Or links to bring them back to the pages with aff links?

Crude, but thats how i set it up when i first got into affiliate marketing

You haven't seen my sites

[99MWD99]

A good solution would be to edit the page.php or single.php file. For sure, let them visit the cat pages, but you could hard code a strong call to action banner or affiliate offer, lets say above the fold on the cat pages.

I have done this and it works wonders. Just a thought.