Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Categories showing on SERP listings?
-
Hi I was wondering if anyone knows what these are called? See attached screenshot.
Basically, it looks like Google is pulling the primary category and then sub categories from the site and adding them to the SERP listing.
Are there any benefits to this besides possibly higher CTR?
Cheers.
-
Hi there,
What SERP results you get depends on your search queries. If you search for a niche category of your products and you see your results, naturally you will see the URL where these products sit. So it is the exact URL of the result.
Potential benefits:
- You see the search term a few times which might look appealing and increase CTR's
- You can easily run research on competitors and see how they organise their sitemap or in which category they place a particular product
- Potentially it can be more eye-catching as it takes more space than a short URL.
I hope this helps.
Katarina
-
Hi wozniak65,
They are breadcrumbs. It is showing the path of where the content is found on the website. It is only seems like its pulling categories but it is just following the path of the content.
Thanks,
Don
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Old brand name being suffixed on Google SERP listings
At the end of some of our listings in Google search results pages, our old brand name is being suffixed even though it is not in our title tags. For context, we re-branded several months ago, and at that time also migrated to a new domain name. Our title tags have our current brand name suffixed, like "Shop Example Category | Example©". In the Google search results, but not in Bing nor Yahoo, about half of our pages have titles whcih instead look like this: "Shop Example Category | Example© - oldBrandName". The "dash" and the old brand name are not in our title tags, but they are being appended, even when our title tags are fairly long. For example, even with titles at 54 characters (421 pixels), the suffix is being appended. BUT, not with our longer title tags. We are actually OK with the brand name being appended if our title tags are on the shorter side, but would prefer that our current brand name be appended instead of the older one. I realize we could increase the length of all our title tags, and perhaps we may go that route. But, does anyone know where Google would be getting the old brand name to append onto the URLs? We've checked and it is not in our page source (the old brand name is used in our page source in some areas of text and some url paths, but not in any kind of meta tag). Per Google's guidance (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-do-not-put-organization-schema-markup-on-every-page/289981/) we only have schema for the "Organization" on our home page, and not on every page. So, assuming this advice is correct to not add schema to every page, how can we inform Google of our current brand name so that it stops appending our old brand name on pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoelevated0 -
Why does the order of the keywords affect my SERP? And what can I do to improve?
Hi all, So, if you google "london life coach" my site appears #2 (www.nickhatter.com) But if you google "life coach London" my SERP seems to fluctuate between #3 up to #6. If you google "life coach in London" my SERP is a solid #2/3. I don't get it all. Would someone care to explain? Also, if you have any tips on how I might improve the EAT of my website please do feel free to weigh in! Many thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickHatster
Nick0 -
Why isn't our complete meta title showing up in the Google SERPS? (cut off half way)
We carry a product line, cutless bearings (for use on boats). For instance, we have one, called the Able, that has the following meta title (and searched by View Page Source to confirm): BOOT 1-3/8" x 2-3/8" x 5-1/2" Johnson Cutless Bearing | BOOT Cutlass However, if I search for it on on Google by part number or name (boot cutless bearing, boot cutlass bearing), the meta title comes back with whole first part chopped off, only showing this : "x 5-1/2" Johnson Cutless Bearing | BOOT Cutlass - Citimarine ..." Any idea why? Here's the url if it will hopefully help: https://citimarinestore.com/en/metallic-inches/156-boot-johnson-cutless-bearing-870352103.html All the products in the category are doing the same. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Citimarine0 -
Meta-description issue in SERPs for different countries
I'm working with a US client on the SEO for their large ecommerce website, I'm working on it from the UK. We've now optimised several of the pages including updating the meta-descriptions etc. The problem is when I search on the keyword iin the UK I see the new updated version of the meta-description in SERPs results. BUT when my client searches on the same keyword in the US they're see the old version of the meta-description. Does any one have any idea why this is happening and how we can resolve it? Thanks Tanya
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TanyaKorteling0 -
Too many Tags and Categories what should I do to clean this up?
Hello, Everyone! I am trying to do a clean up for one of my client sites. I'm noticing that the Categories and tags are way out of hand. It looks like random tags and categories were just added because they could be added. Are all of these tags and categories contributing to duplicate content? And if so What method should I go about to cleaning this up? The only thing that seems logical to me is rel=canonical. Thank you so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Striventa1 -
Subdomain replaced domain in Google SERP
Good morning, This is my first post. I found many Q&As here that mostly answer my question, but just to be sure we do this right I'm hoping the community can take a peak at my thinking below: Problem: We are relevant rank #1 for "custom poker chips" for example. We have this development website on a subdomain (http://dev.chiplab.com). On Saturday our live 'chiplab.com' main domain was replaced by 'dev.chiplab.com' in the SERP. Expected Cause: We did not add NOFOLLOW to the header tag. We also did not DISALLOW the subdomain in the robots.txt. We could have also put the 'dev.chiplab.com' subdomain behind a password wall. Solution: Add NOFOLLOW header, update robots.txt on subdomain and disallow crawl/index. Question: If we remove the subdomain from Google using WMT, will this drop us completely from the SERP? In other words, we would ideally like our root chiplab.com domain to replace the subdomain to get us back to where we were before Saturday. If the removal tool in WMT just removes the link completely, then is the only solution to wait until the site is recrawled and reindexed and hope the root chiplab.com domain ranks in place of the subdomain again? Thank you for your time, Chase
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chiplab0 -
Other domains hosted on same server showing up in SERP for 1st site's keywords
For the website in question, the first domain alphabetically on the shared hosting space, strange search results are appearing on the SERP for keywords associated with the site. Here is an example: A search for "unique company name" shows the results: www.uniquecompanyname.com as the top result. But on pages 2 and 3, we are getting results for the same content but for domains hosted on the same server. Here are some examples with the domain name replaced: UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Motava
ftp.DOMAIN2.com/?action=news&id=63
META DESCRIPTION TEXT UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN3.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 2
www.DOMAIN4.com/?action=news&id=120
META DESCRIPTION TEXT2 UNIQUE DOMAIN NAME PAGE TITLE 3
mail.DOMAIN5.com/?action=category&id=17
META DESCRIPTION TEXT3 ns5.DOMAIN6.com/?action=article&id=27 There are more but those are just some examples. These other domain names being listed are other customer domains on the same VPS shared server. When clicking the result the browser URL still shows the other customer domain name B but the content is usually the 404 page. The page title and meta description on that page is not displayed the same as on the SERP.As far as we can tell, this is the only domain this is occurring for.So far, no crawl errors detected in Webmaster Tools and moz crawl not completed yet.0 -
Cross linking between categories
Is it useful for SEO to cross link between TOP level categories, let's say I have a Home page and then 2 sub categories, one about green widgets one about red widgets
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics
Should i create a link from the green widget to the red widget or should I leave those are separate silos ? I know that within a silo i need to cross link ( from green widget 1 to green widget 2 etc... ) but how about about from the main category to the other main category ?0