Category versus product pages

Google prefering category pages versus product pages

[SigDays]

We run a retail site and have noticed that Google prefers to list our category and subcategory pages for descriptive search queries rather than the lowest level product pages.

To demonstrate: a search for "chicago blue widgets" would show our "blue widgets" category page rather than the "chicago blue widgets" product page. In this case, the word chicago is present in the category page and 9 times out of 10 google presents this page in the results page.

Our URLs are dynamically generated and include a sku id as well as a location id.

We have looked into flattening out the URL structure so that particular sku's are tied directly to location rather than using the location id separately in the URL string.

Any thoughts?

[asher02]

I see the same, I guess it is because normally category pages are level 2 while products pages are in deeper levels.

If you need to push a product page back to serp try and place a link to it from your home page, the best spot for that will be a featured product section or something similar.

[freelistfool]

I see the same thing on one of my sites. The funny thing is that the snippet shown in the Google search results is the link to the detail page. This site is fairly new so I'm assuming that once the deeper pages get some external linking they'll start to show up for those searches.