- Keval Shah, founder of an ecommerce SEO and AEO agency, says a client’s category page fell out of the top spot for a keyword pulling in over 40,000 searches a month, replaced entirely by competitor homepages.
- He recovered the ranking within days by redirecting the category page to the homepage, then optimizing the homepage itself for the target keyword, a fix that lines up with a well-documented SEO problem called keyword cannibalization.
Three months of stable rankings can vanish without a single site error to explain why. That’s roughly what happened to an ecommerce brand working with SEO and AEO consultant Keval Shah, who watched a category page fall out of the #1 spot for a keyword worth more than 40,000 monthly searches.
He ran the usual checks first. Broken links, indexing issues, and a stray no-index tag somewhere in the template. Nothing turned up, and that’s often the most frustrating stage of a ranking drop; the site looks fine, yet the traffic keeps sliding. The answer, it turned out, was sitting in the search results themselves, not on the site.
3 months ago, an ecom brand I work with completely lost #1 rankings for their main keyword.
The keyword gets over 40,000 searches a month, so it was a massive blow to their revenue.
At first, I thought I screwed something up.
I ran countless audits of the site but I couldn’t…
— Keval Shah | Ecom SEO + AEO (@SEOKeval) June 30, 2026
A Page Type Problem, Not a Content Problem
Shah described the situation on X, explaining that when he searched the keyword directly, every result at the top of the page was a brand homepage. Category pages, the page type that had historically claimed real estate, had been pushed down or out entirely. Not weakened. Replaced.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Category pages and homepages do different jobs on an ecommerce site. A category page groups related products around a commercial query; a homepage orients a visitor to the brand as a whole, usually with far less product-specific text to work with. When Google starts preferring the latter for a broad product search, it’s making a call about which page best answers that particular intent. It isn’t necessarily judging content quality at all.
Shah’s fix leaned straight into that judgment rather than fighting it. Four moves, executed quickly:
- Redirected the category page’s URL to the homepage.
- Gave the category page a new, unindexed URL so shoppers could still browse it directly.
- Stripped the target keyword out of the category page’s title, headings and copy.
- Added that same keyword to the homepage’s title tag and meta description.
The ranking came back to #1 within days. Same brand, same keyword, different URL entirely.
Why Does This Look Like Cannibalization, Not a Ranking Bug?
There is a well-documented SEO problem that fits Shah’s case closely: keyword cannibalization. It happens when two or more pages on the same site target the same or very similar keywords, forcing Google to choose which page should rank.
That framing also explains why Shah’s fix worked so cleanly. Homepages on most ecommerce sites usually carry more accumulated internal and external authority than any single category page, simply because more of a site’s navigation, footer links and inbound backlinks point there by default. If a homepage starts competing for the same keyword as a category page, even mild competition, the homepage’s authority advantage can be enough to tip Google toward it once both pages carry similar signals. Removing the keyword from the category page didn’t fix a penalty. It removed the competition.
Why Does This Fit a Broader Pattern?
Context helps here, because a tweet about just one keyword could easily be brushed off as noise. Google’s March 2026 core update started rolling out on March 27 and completed on April 8. Shah posted his tweet on June 30 and described a change from “3 months ago.”
Nothing in his post ties the swap to a named update, and Google hasn’t confirmed any deliberate page-type preference shift, so the connection stays circumstantial. It’s just as plausible that a core update simply changed how closely the homepage and category page were competing for that term, surfacing a cannibalization issue that had been dormant.
That caution matters generally, and not just in this case. The Query Post reported last week that a fresh wave of Google traffic drops may have more to do with SERP feature changes than any confirmed update, and the same logic applies here. One page type losing ground for one keyword is not, on its own, evidence of an industry-wide shift.
What isn’t circumstantial is how much revenue is riding on category pages for ecommerce sites generally, which is exactly why a story like this travels fast among SEOs. Baymard Institute’s usability research puts a number on how common structural gaps like this still are: 32% of ecommerce sites don’t have proper category pages at all, despite them consistently performing well in testing. That underscores how deliberately most SEO teams have built these pages up, and how easily a cannibalization issue can undo months of that work without anyone touching the page itself.
What Changed Underneath the Result?
There’s a reasonable explanation for why a homepage might occasionally outrank a category page for a broad head term, and it isn’t necessarily a wholesale demotion of category pages as a page type.
Queries that lie somewhere in between navigational and commercial fall into the grey area of brand-adjacent searches. If a user is searching for a broad product category that is not branded, it is entirely reasonable to direct them to the homepage that fully encompasses the entire collection, especially when the category page is poor, templated, and duplicated through various facets of navigation, which is exactly what ecommerce SEO experts have long cautioned about.
Shah’s response treats the symptom, not the underlying cause. Stripping the category page of its keyword and shifting that signal to the homepage worked, but it’s a manual patch applied to one keyword on one site, not a diagnosis of why Google changed its mind. It lines up with an approach The Query Post outlined recently in a piece on how SEO recovery starts with finding the real problem before making changes: check what’s actually ranking before assuming the fix is more content, a technical audit, or a link-building push. Whether Shah’s swap holds up as Google’s results continue to shift, or whether the category page recovers its position naturally once the volatility settles, isn’t something a single case can answer.
What Ecommerce Teams Should Check
The instinct to treat any ranking drop as a bug to be patched with more content is understandable. Shah’s approach points to something more useful: check what’s actually occupying the top results before assuming your existing page is still the right one to optimize for that term.
A few things worth doing if a high-value category page loses ground unexpectedly:
- Search the keyword directly and note the page types ranking, not just the domains sitting in those spots.
- Check whether your own homepage is quietly optimized for the same keyword as the category page; that overlap is often the real trigger, not an algorithm change.
- Rule out core update timing using Google’s Search Status Dashboard before treating it as a technical fault on your own site.
- Resist redirecting or stripping a category page’s keyword purely on the strength of one term’s movement; Shah’s fix targeted a single query, not the whole category structure.
- Keep the original category page accessible, even under a new URL, since it still serves shoppers who land there through navigation rather than search.
Category pages remain the backbone of ecommerce organic revenue for the brands doing them properly. One anecdote about one keyword swapping to a homepage isn’t evidence that’s changing structurally, at least not yet. It looks more like a textbook cannibalization case that happened to coincide with update volatility, which is a useful reminder either way: watching which of your own pages compete for the same term is still the fastest way to catch this before it costs you a ranking.
