35 Categories + sub-categories for online store, can it hurt SEO?
-
this is my online store http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com
I experiencing new site architecture for better buyer experience. I found this solution for setting up categories:
http://filtration-montreal.mybigcommerce.com
I ask this questions many times about my site architecture, I find this solution, using around 35 categories and sub-categories.
Is it O.K. or it can hurt SEO to have to many categories.
See example on this trial version of BigCommerce:
http://filtration-montreal.mybigcommerce.com
I will use the top horizontal menu for the most popular furnace filters sizes.
Also, I want to use this cascading dropdown option in the header
http://www.asp.net/ajaxLibrary/AjaxControlToolkitSampleSite/CascadingDropDown/CascadingDropDown.aspx
where I wiil setup 3 options to select:
filter width
filter lenght
filter depth
What is your opinions, I'm I on the right path?
Thank you,
BigBlaze
-
Ce n'est rien Jean.
I have a suggestion for you for a site to look at. I suggest it because they too have a lot of products to put online. Also, many of their products differ only by dimension. It might be helpful for you to study how they organize these thousands of products. This Website has one awards for marketing so it's a really good example of e-commerce marketing products that could be very boring, but they make them interesting:
Dana
-
Hi Dana,
Thank you for your precious help. I had many questions and you are always ready to help.
French is my native language, so I don't always get everything clear. For example, the Hub page was hard to figure out and I never really understand how I could creat one in BigCommerce.
Also, when talking about navigation and sorting, do you make reference to my Categories/Top menu ( navigation) and sorting ( DropDown menue)?
If you think you have any recommendation to give or positive advice on my online store, I will be happy to learn from you
Thank you,
BigBlaze
-
Hi BigBlaze,
In general, I think the architecture I see on your sample site looks perfectly acceptable to me. It looks like you are only going down to one subcategory after that, which is a good thing. I think when too many categories becomes a problem is when the categories go 3 and 4 deep with subcats of subcats of subcats. Once your content or products get buried that deep, it's hard for search engine bots to keep crawling. I think if you can keep you architecture as flat as possible and still make it easy for people to find what they seek, you will do just fine. I think adding the filter width, length and depth as sorting options is good. Just remember that there is navigation and then there is sorting. Giving your visitors several clear and even redundant ways to find things is good.
Hope that helps!
Dana
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
-
Can Anybody Understand This ?
Hey guyz,
Technical SEO | | atakala
These days I'm reading the paperwork from sergey brin and larry which is the first paper of Google.
And I dont get the Ranking part which is: "Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence. First, consider the simplest case -- a single word query. In order to rank a document with a single word query, Google looks at that document's hit list for that word. Google considers each hit to be one of several different types (title, anchor, URL, plain text large font, plain text small font, ...), each of which has its own type-weight. The type-weights make up a vector indexed by type. Google counts the number of hits of each type in the hit list. Then every count is converted into a count-weight. Count-weights increase linearly with counts at first but quickly taper off so that more than a certain count will not help. We take the dot product of the vector of count-weights with the vector of type-weights to compute an IR score for the document. Finally, the IR score is combined with PageRank to give a final rank to the document. For a multi-word search, the situation is more complicated. Now multiple hit lists must be scanned through at once so that hits occurring close together in a document are weighted higher than hits occurring far apart. The hits from the multiple hit lists are matched up so that nearby hits are matched together. For every matched set of hits, a proximity is computed. The proximity is based on how far apart the hits are in the document (or anchor) but is classified into 10 different value "bins" ranging from a phrase match to "not even close". Counts are computed not only for every type of hit but for every type and proximity. Every type and proximity pair has a type-prox-weight. The counts are converted into count-weights and we take the dot product of the count-weights and the type-prox-weights to compute an IR score. All of these numbers and matrices can all be displayed with the search results using a special debug mode. These displays have been very helpful in developing the ranking system. "0 -
How can you add meta discription for your homepage in yoast wordpress SEO?
Hello everyone Can some please tell me how to add meta description for your homepage in yoast wordpress SEO. I've wrote the description in titles and Metas section but it didn't work. Only my title page worked fine. I really need help on this one. thank you
Technical SEO | | nashnazer0 -
My site has dropped in rankings what can i do to change this
My site is http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/ Hi, my site has always done amazing in the rankings, for a few years i have been number one for the word gastric band hypnotherapy as well as many other keywords which includes hypno band. but in the past couple of weeks i have seen some of my keywords drop and end up on pages two and three of google instead of page one. Can anyone please give me advice on what i need to do to change this situation please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
SEO Checklist
Ok I know that this would be a huge over-simplification but I am wondering if there is (at least a bird's eye view) a checklist of SEO do's and dont's? I checked to see if something like this existed but could not find one. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks~
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Is Buying Domains Good For SEO? Can I 301 redirect domains to an Original website?
I have a friend that purchased multiple domains related to their website. Each of these domains have the back ground of the original website and irrelevant content on them. Is is possible to redirect the various domains to certain pages on the original website. For example if the website is www.shoes.com and they purchased domains such as www.leathermensshoes.com and a few others related to the website. Is it SEO friendly to link the domains purchased to the original website?
Technical SEO | | TSpike10 -
If people link to you incorrectly, does it hurt you?
In Google WM tools I'm seeing so many 404 crawl errors but they're all from other sites linking to us incorrectly, which I can't do anything about. Will this hurt us somehow as far as SEO goes? The logical thing would be that it would hurt the site doiing the linking but it does come up in OUR WM tools, so it makes me wonder.
Technical SEO | | UnderRugSwept0 -
301 Redirects - SEO Benefit?
Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store. We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site. Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda. Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).
Technical SEO | | airnwater0 -
What are SEO factors in re-doing a website?
Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here. If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory? What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?
Technical SEO | | bvalentine0