How to make a custom category page in WordPress?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

Hello. For the first time in my life, I had a need to make a website on WordPress and I ran into a problem.

As I understand it, any entry must belong to some category. Or it will fall into the category of "no rubric". But what if I have, for example, a section with articles about kittens. This is a separate page that will be promoted in search engines. The address will be: domen.ru/kittens/. And all the entries that will be about kittens, I will, as it were, refer to the heading "kittens".

Thus, all entries will be duplicated at the address: domen.ru/category/kittens/. Those. it turns out that I will have one normal page, which I will make myself, with a normal design, and the other will be automatically generated. As a result, both of them will get into the index of search engines and this will have a bad effect on the promotion of the very page that I created with trepidation and love.

Question: how to be? The category page itself can be somehow normally designed (maybe it depends on the template?) so as not to create the page itself, but limit itself to creating and editing the category?

I, as a person far from development, webmastering and WordPress, have the following options so far:
1. Leave two pages, just created automatically close from indexing in robots.txt;
2. Do not display a link to the category anywhere on the site and set up a redirect to the page I created;
3. Do not create a page at all and limit yourself to creating a category.

In general, do not judge strictly, I am very far from all this, so I will be extremely grateful for ANY thoughts on this matter.

Answer 1

The category page itself can be designed somehow normally

Can.
There are many php files in the template and basically each one is responsible for generating certain types of pages. Which file will be used for a particular page is calculated by a known algorithm .
In your case, you can copy the file category.php(it may not be there, but I assume it is) to a category-{TERM_ID}.php. For example category-25.php-- is responsible for generating the category page with ID 25 . And modify this file as you wish.