Pages can be optimized better then categories?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Raquel Lynn: This might be a pretty "dumb SEO question" but here goes. I've always had successful traffic from Google on several of my blog's pages. For example I had a turquoise cowboy boot page which I manually added all cowboy boots colored turquoise too. These were from my cowboy boots blog category. About 6 months ago I decided to add a new blog category called "turquoise cowboy boots" so my posts would naturally archive. I also then deleted my turquoise cowboy boot page. I thought this was a smart move, but it turns out that my traffic from Google searching for turquoise cowboy boots has been way down. I'm assuming this is because pages can be optimized better then categories? I'm also assuming pages naturally rank higher than categories? Any insight on pages vs. categories for SEO would be appreciated. ;
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  Jim Munro: Hi +Raquel Lynn ;, thank you for your participation here.
  
  I am not an expert but I see it this way.
  
  Googlebot's view of the web is page-centric, not site-centric, so the rankings you previously enjoyed stemmed from your page, not from your website. I think if you are able to reconstruct the page you removed with exactly the same url, the traffic will come back, even if you deleted it a long time ago (but it must be the same url. If your cms cannot recreate the url maybe a developer on fiverr can create a stand-alone page and edit your htaccess for you to replace the deleted url).
  
  Archive.org might have a copy of your old page.
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  Raquel Lynn: Thank you +Jim Munro ;  ;, that makes complete sense. I didn't realize the importance of pages for SEO until I really started going through my analytics. I really shot myself in the foot with that - I had individual pages getting 4k monthly hits and now they get around 400 as categories. I can definitely recreate the page with the same url again. Thanks again for the feedback. ;
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  ?ukasz Rogala: Did you redirect pages to categories? If not your previous URLs return 404 now or redirect users to home page.
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  Tony McCreath: If it's wordpress you should find the posts under trash.
  
  A category page does not contain the content of your posts but just lists the posts in that category. You delete the post and it also disappears from the category making it an empty page.
  
  In WordPress I'd also recommend you make the category pages just list a summary of your posts and not the whole thing. That's better for users and bots.
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  Raquel Lynn: Thanks +Tony McCreath ;for the feedback! ;
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  Raquel Lynn: +Łukasz Rogala, I did do the redirect. My main mistake was not realizing the power of pages in a Google search and that I would loose traffic from organic searches by deleting those pages and using categories as a replacement. ;
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  ?ukasz Rogala: Well using categories isn't bad too. All you should do is a redirect 301 to new category pages. You can still try doing that by "catching" 404 links in GWT and redirecting via .htaccess (if you host blog on your own domain and CMS).