E-Commerce Categorization
-
I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories.
At want point does categorization become too flat?
-
Making such radical changes is always something that shouldn't be taken lightly, that's for sure. And if it's done, you'll need to have a spreadsheet where you can enter a column with all the page names, a column with their current URLs, and one with the new URLs, because implementing 301 Redirects is critical but can be a nightmare otherwise.
What it comes down to is evaluating the value of other SEO (on-site, link-building, and social) that can be done to improve things as compared with architectural changes. Judgment calls. Not always fun.
-
Yeah that makes sense. Unfortunately this site is built in ProStores, which gives me no control over the URL structure. It makes me hesitant to make category changes that are going to recreate the URL structure.
ProStores is a nightmare.
-
Roger,
Categorization becomes too flat at the moment you lose high quality visitors. Since the site started out flat, there's no way to tell what that point it. The only way to determine if it's already too flat is to refine it. I always recommend to clients that it's best to have no more than eight to ten top level categories, and only have sidebar navigation that links to sub-categories within the specific category you're in, or at most, those, then below them, two or three additional links to similar top level categories.
The reason for this method is because in the flat model, you have no way of communicating to search engines what the real relationship separation is. This in turn dilutes the ability to drive more strength to the highest level categories. The end result then is a situation where your top level categories don't do as well for their most important keyword phrases, the sub-category page phrases also suffer, and in turn, individual product pages do as well.
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
-
Moving E-Commerce Store to Subdomain?
Hi all, We have a customer who currently uses Square for their in-store point-of-sale system as well as for their e-commerce website. From my understanding, a Square site is a watered-down version of Weebly, and is proving to be highly restrictive from an SEO and content structuring standpoint. It's been an uphill battle to try and get traction for their site in SERPs. Would it be a bad idea to move the entire Square online store to a subdomain, and install WordPress on the root domain? This way their online store would remain as-is, but the primary pages on the site would be on WordPress which would give us a lot more control over the content. I just want to make sure this doesn't negatively impact their SEO. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | suarezventures0 -
Redundant categorization - "boys" and "girls" category. Any other suggestions than implementing filtering?
One of our clients (a children's clothing company) has split their categories (outwear, tops, shoes) between boys and girls - There's one category page for girls outwear, and one category for boys outwear. I am suspecting that this redundant categorisation is diluting link juice and rankings for the related search queries. Important points: The clothes themselves are rather gender-neutral, girl's sweaters don't differ that much from the boy's sweaters. Our keyword research indicates that norwegians' search queries are also pretty gender neutral - people are generally searching after "children's dresses", "shoes for kids", "snowsuits", etc. So these gender specific categories are not really reflective of people's search behavior. I acknowledge that implementing a filter for "boys" and "girls" would be the best way to solve this redundant categorization, but that would simply be to expensive for our client. I'm thinking that some sort of canonicalisation would be the best approach to solve this issue. Are there any other suggestions or comments to this?
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Does adding subcategory pages to an commerce site limit the link juice to the product pages?
I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages. Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Staging & Development areas should be not indexable (i.e. no followed/no index in meta robots etc)
Hi I take it if theres a staging or development area on a subdomain for a site, who's content is hence usually duplicate then this should not be indexable i.e. (no-indexed & nofollowed in metarobots) ? In order to prevent dupe content probs as well as non project related people seeing work in progress or finding accidentally in search engine listings ? Also if theres no such info in meta robots is there any other way it may have been made non-indexable, or at least dupe content prob removed by canonicalising the page to the equivalent page on the live site ? In the case in question i am finding it listed in serps when i search for the staging/dev area url, so i presume this needs urgent attention ? Cheers Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Internal Blog - Embed Categorized RSS Feeds into Site Web Pages
I am thinking about additional ways to repurpose blog posts through out my website. I have a blog - http://www.domainname.com/blog I would like to use the blog categories, which are aligned with the site structure, and create on-page RSS Feeds for my regular web pages. Anything here that might not be good for SEO? Thank you
Technical SEO | | evereffect0 -
IBM Websphere Commerce - Good Platform Or Not?
I have recently started working with a fairly large company that is rethinking their web paltform. Currently they use IBM Websphere Commerce, but I'm finding a lot of limitations with it as far as SEO, content managment etc., it seems that the simplest things take a lot of resources and time. On top of that, IT has had developed other modules that integrate with it to make it do what it needs to do, so we are using multiple systems. The question we are evaluating is if Websphere is capable of providing what we need and just needs developed and implemented, or is in a platform that is not friendly for our needs? It may be easy to say to scrap it and move on, but everyone knows how difficult it is to change platforms, especially for a multi million dollar company that is doing a lot of business. So if the current system is capable, we want to make use of it, but we're not sure if it is even capable. Has anyone had direct experience with this platform?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Canonicalization Issue | E-commerce
Hey everyone! How are you doing? I spent this week trying to solve some technical issues on my website. However i am having trouble with Duplicate Content. I came to the conclusion that canonicalization is a great solution to this problem, however, i am having trouble implementing it. The duplicate problem arises from the fact that for each product i have several colors or different attributes. For example. I have the category "Construction Clips" and then links to "Color" in which the user can choose White or Sandstone. The content is almost identical for both of them, the only thing that changes is the color. This scenarios repeats many times throughout my webcommerce site. And is throwing me off many Duplicate Content errors. I cannot use the canonicalization in the White or Sandstone page, because is a product page, it doesnt let me add or change anything on the header. http://aceromart.com/Clip-Glamet-Blanco.aspx I dont intend to rank well on most product pages, my priority is that i dont want duplicate errors on my website. What is the best solution for this conundrum? Regards!!! In advance, i thank you for your opinions!
Technical SEO | | JesusD0 -
Wordpress for e-commerce
What plugin should I use to make a webshop taht is good for seo as well? Should I use wordpress indeed or should i use some other open source CMS?
Technical SEO | | sesertin0