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I recognized your name and happen to remember that you operate a paid membership website, so I thought I’d chime in. Most of what you’re publishing behind your paid firewall isn’t being seen by the search engines, so I think in your case, it’s Ok to keep doing what you’re doing for your members’ benefit.

If you ever decide to publish a free companion site to CreditToday.net, where you’d be posting articles in full for free (perhaps older archived content?), then we would recommend applying the discipline of posting each article in only one category.

Hope this makes sense!

Best,

Kim

We only just figured this one out. Our primary keyword at all times is Online Publishing, so we’re constantly watching our rank on that term. We originally were doing what you’re doing, which is applying articles to as many categories as we thought they could fall into.

But a couple of times, we posted articles, only using “Online Publishing” as the category (simply because they didn’t apply to another one), and suddenly we were ranked on Online Publishing with that article.

So, we started putting articles in one single category, and suddenly they were all getting picked up on their designated term.

I think what we learned is that we’re “spreading out” our results by assigning posts to every category it could possibly apply to. By being more focused, we’re getting much better rankings, where before we wouldn’t rank at all.

Now we’re working on making sure we have more specific categories so that it’s still user-friendly but also working for us in terms of SEO.

Remember, you can also use tags to define your content too, and as far as we can tell, you can assign as many tags as you want and it doesn’t dilute the results.

As always, an interesting and worthwhile read. I have a question regarding your rule #4:

>> Rule #4: Assign posts to a single category.

Why? From testing, it’s become abundantly clear that assigning single categories to articles boosts ranking on the category title. Hopefully your categories (or topics) are named as keywords that you want to be ranked on. This can also avoid duplicate content. >>

I want to make sure I understand this correctly. On our site, our articles are organized into what we refer to as “departments,” perhaps (though I’m not sure) the same as what you refer to as “categories.”

When we have an article that might be useful in multiple departments, we “clone” it into all of them, so it can be found by our users in various places on our site.

Does this practice hurt you with the search engines?

We’ve done it to be more user-friendly with our members, but maybe it’s counterproductive.

Thanks,

Rob