Hi, I have a question I want to change my category: http://www.sandrophoto.com/category/famous-photographers/ into a blog post. Instead of category I'm thinking to make it into a blog post, then redirect 301 category link to the blog post... Right now I'm ranking good for that category in google, if I change it, will i be able to conserve ranking? how long will it take to rank same as category? any thoughts?
In time probably you will give back the same rank. But at the beginning your site will be consider like a new site.
I'm not sure what you hope to achieve by doing this... Your category page is ranking well for "famous photographers". I see it ranking at about position 8 at Google. Similarly I see the posts under that category like yours on "helmut newton" ranking as follows: "helmut newton famous photographer" ranks position #4 @ Google "helmut newton famous photographers" ranks position #5 @ Google which is exactly the keyword phrase your <title> for that post indicates that you are targeting. Why would you want to convert your category page to a post? It's ranking well as is. You will likely not gain anything by doing so. Leave it the way it is IMO. The way blogs are designed (if properly implemented) you create Theme Pyramids which are a great site architecture for ranking at Google since ALL posts under a category should be related to the category. So the links from the category page to the posts (and visa versa) are all VERY relevant links. I call this the "flow of relevance". Categories SHOULD rank for the more general terms and their associated posts rank for more long tail terms. You're site is fine... If it ain't broken then don't "fix" it. PS: Nice clean looking blog. I like the theme.
I woudlnt do it unless you want to get de ranked for a bunch of keywords that page currently ranks for they may or may not come back..
I understand, thanks! My take was to actually get ranked higher for famous photographesr... since I'm 8th only, and the guy #1 has just links to photographer websites on a single page, so I was thinking google doesn't like my way of doing :S another reason, was to cut down categories on my blog... I had 25 cats, that I cut down to 10, that's why was thinking to include that category for reducing clatter.
Once you hit page one with one of your URLs for a big term like "famous photographers" I would avoid changing anything about the page. I would simply build more links from other sites to climb the rest of the way to the top. My $0.02.
Put a big post on top of this category with lots of relevant high quality (link-bait) text Exchange links with other relevant sites (you can use a plugin for this) Try adding the headline at the bottom of the page too