Editing content on Category pages in Wordpress

BetOnlineUK

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2016
Messages
431
Reaction score
202
Hi all,

I know there are plugins (albeit outdated ones) but is there a way of making a category page editable so that I can add more content than just the specific category posts?

I only ask as it seems some of my category post pages rank so much higher than a page built for that particular subject matter with the same posts.

Any help would be great
 

baldidiot

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2011
Messages
707
Reaction score
213

BetOnlineUK

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2016
Messages
431
Reaction score
202
It all looks very limiting in what you can add, but that may be how I am reading it. Good call on the child them, I must admit I thought that was activated but it is not. My dilemma is that I do not always do a post when it comes to the category but add the offer directly on the subject page for speed sake.

Thanks @baldidiot I will investigate it further though, I would like to figure it out one way or the other if only for a future project coming up.

Doh, I have just realised that I have not put up the category on the page I had, maybe that is why the category is ranking better than it's dedicated page. Let's see if that makes a difference.
 

eenzoo

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Oct 29, 2015
Messages
216
Reaction score
166
There are a lot of themes who allow you to set up a proper category page. But I do this in a different way. Categories are always "noindex" because of internal duplicated content.

Instead, I build a page. Let's say you have:
domain.com/cat1 - then i build a page domain.com/page1 and redirect /cat1 via 301 to /page1

Now you have the full control and flexibility to create a great page. You can add content as much as you want, ads, cta's and via a plugin you can show the category posts easily too to keep the actual benefit of a category page.
 

BetOnlineUK

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2016
Messages
431
Reaction score
202
I could redirect it like you said @eenzoo and probably will. It is strange I use an SEO plugin and have set it to noindex for categories and other elements of the site. But months after setting it to noindex, I still see's this category in the SE.
 

baldidiot

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Feb 23, 2011
Messages
707
Reaction score
213
It all looks very limiting in what you can add, but that may be how I am reading it.

You can do whatever you like really, just depends on how dirty you want your hands to get. You could create a whole new set of custom fields for the categories and output them before and after etc.. but you're talking more effort and more coding knowledge.

Having said this I personally prefer to have pages that act as categories with shortcodes to output posts within a bigger layout anyway.
 

BetOnlineUK

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Jun 8, 2016
Messages
431
Reaction score
202
I do have pages that pull in the categories which is great as I can control what goes on there. As my knowledge when it comes to php etc is rubbish (just about getting the hang of css) I think I will redirect the cat page to the page.

Cheers for the help though
 

NDG

Affiliate Guard Dog Member
Joined
Sep 19, 2013
Messages
643
Reaction score
456
You can directly edit the category pages. It just takes some working knowledge on
how to edit them and make everything display correctly in your particular theme.
It's not that uncommon for category pages to rank higher than individual posts.
 

Rick Perry

AGD Member Ltd
Joined
Jun 15, 2015
Messages
106
Reaction score
14
They rank better not because they are just "categories", but because of the website structure - it is called "silo structure" ;-)
 
Top