Site Category structure detrimental to SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
I am hoping that you may be able to help with an internal debate on whether our currently category structuring could be damaging from an SEO point of view.
Our site sells t shirts primarily and as such we have a large product base of around 7000+ products. Our category structure currently works like so:
Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/
Which I think is fairly typical, though this where it gets interesting, within this end category of "/TV/" there are around 120 categories that are used from a filtration point of view to contain items for each specific show etc, IE Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Breaking_Bad, Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Game_of_Thrones. The vast majority of these categories have between 1 and 3 products within them and the rest higher.
Multiply this by the large amount of categories that we have on site and these end level "Band Title" categories amount to around 13,000+ categories in the directory.
If at this point we put the filtration element aside, what is the communities opinion of the benefits or drawbacks of having the category structure like this?
Thanks in advance for any feedback.
-
Search engines tend to reward sites that have more comprehensive pages, so I tend to think these category pages are detrimental. Besides creating too many pages with very little content, they're all competing amongst themselves and probably appear as duplicate content - there's likely to be more HTML for your header and footer on the page than actual content.
From a user experience, I'd also personally get frustrated clicking through that many times to get to what I want only to find there are so few products in that category. Or if I hopped straight there from a Google search, onto a page with so few products, I'd be likely not to stick around long. I'd rather see more and narrow it down myself.
I would suggest doing one of two things:
A - Filter dynamically. Instead of having all these as permanent pages, have the TV category as the last permanent page, and use checkboxes to filter down. That way you're going to a dynamic URL, not a static one. So basically, your customers get the benefit of seeing the set of products they want, but it's not a permanent "page" on your website that would get indexed. Depends heavily on what technology you're using as to how difficult this would be to change.
B - If you can't filter dynamically, it might be easier for you to add meta noindex tags, or update robots.txt, to block everything below the TV category. You'll still have pages where customers can see their narrow set of products, but the meta tags or robots.txt will tell spiders not to link to pages that far down.
As a side note, special characters in URLs are not a best practice, so I'd get rid of the ampersands if possible.
-
This isn't answer but you need to read that articles:
https://moz.com/blog/pruning-your-ecommerce-site
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
http://www.stateofdigital.com/optimising-urls-seo-ux/And reading that could increase internal debates about your information architecture of site or silo structure.
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
-
What are the SEO considerations when migrating a whole site from http to https
Hi Mozzers, I'm in the process of migrating a whole site, which has excellent rankings built through ongoing SEO over the years, from http to https. What is the safest way of doing this, while maintaining rankings? I'm assuming 301 redirect of every page from http to https? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | A_Q1 -
301'd site, but new site is not getting picked up in google.
Hi I'm having big issues! Any help would be greatly appreciated This is the 3rd time this happened. Every time I switch my old site greatcleanjokes.com to the new design of chokeonajoke.com traffic goes almost completely down (I even tried out the new design on greatcleanjokes [to see if it was a 301 issue] and traffic also went down.) What can possibly be wrong with this new site that google just doesn't like it ?! I was ranking high up for many big phrase like joke of the day, corny jokes, clean jokes, short jokes. Now It's all gone. I also think it's strange that when I search for site:chokeonajoke.com the post pages show up before the category pages!? Here is the old site http://web.archive.org/web/20140406214615/http://www.greatcleanjokes.com/ Here is the new one http://chokeonajoke.com/ If you can't figure out anything do you know of anyone I can hire who may be able to figure it out?
Technical SEO | | Nickys22111 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
Do I need to do on-page SEO for my mobile site?
We have a desktop site, and we just built our first mobile site. Right now, the mobile site doesn't have any title tags, meta descriptions or anything like that, but do I need to even do that? If I have all of that on the desktop site, and the mobile site is just redirected from the desktop site, can't I just do it on the desktop site only? Is there anything to gain from doing it for both sites?
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
SEO URLs?
What are the best practices for generating SEO-friendly headlines? dashes between words? underscores between words? etc. Looking for a programatically generated solution that's using editor-written headlines to produce an SEO-friendly URL Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShaneHolladay0 -
Does posting an article on multiple sites hurt seo?
A client of mine creates thought leadership articles and pitches multiple sites to host the article on their site to reach different audiences. The sites that pick it up are places such as AdAge and MarketingProfs and we do get link juice from these sources most of the time. Does having the same article on these sites as well as your own hurt your SEO efforts in any way? Could it be recognized as duplicate content? I know the links are great just wondering if there is any other side effects especially when there are no links provided! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Domain redirect seo
Hello, my domain www.pacomarca.com and when i start the new campaing i get this pronblem: We have detected that the domain www.pacomarca.com and the domain pacomarca.com both respond to web requests and do not redirect. Having two "twin" domains that both resolve forces them to battle for SERP positions, making your SEO efforts less effective. We suggest redirecting one, then entering the other here. my domain is in networksolutions.com. how can i resolve it? many thanks Gonzalo
Technical SEO | | Kuna0 -
URL Structure
Hi Guys, I'm in the process of creating a very exciting startup aimed at the baby industry. It's essentially a social commerce question where parents can shop for products, create lists of products and ask questions. The challenge I'm facing is how best to structure my URLs from an SEO standpoint. For example a common baby topic such as "feeding", can sit in all three categories: Shopping category aggregates all products related to feeding List category aggregates all lists related to feeding Question category aggregates all question and answers on feeding So for that keyword "feeding" you have 3 potential landing pages. What I was wondering is what is the most effective way of doing it? I was thinking of something along these lines: /shopping/feeding /baby_list/feeding /ask/feeding Would love to hear your points of view on this. Thanks! Walid
Technical SEO | | walidalsaqqaf0