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Hey Steven,

Good question! I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this too.

When it comes to categories, I think as long as there's no keyword cannibalisation taking place and users can still easily find what they're looking for within 1 or 2 clicks from the homepage, there's not too much of an issue with creating them. But it could affect how many of your product pages get indexed, as crawlers might use their resource indexing your categories instead. That might not be the case or 100% correct, but it's something to bear in mind.

As long as your categories are logical, make sense to the end user and don't overlap with other categories much, you should be fine.

Hi Sergey,

You're spot on with the question and to be honest I feel a bit daft for not thinking of parameters before! (Doh!) But it doesn't seem to be an issue with Google - only other bots like Moz and Screaming Frog seem to pick it up which strikes me as strange.

Thanks for your answer though - very helpful!

Hey Janet,

Like Jordan says, putting a bit of content around each to provide a bit of background info about each service would be good, rather than just a list of links to other companies.

About the follow / nofollow issue, as long as the sites aren't spammy, there shouldn't be a need to nofollow them. I've heard it reinforced several times recently that as long as you trust the website you're linking to, there's no need to nofollow the link. Adding a nofollow to the link is like saying to search engines, 'I don't trust this guy' - but if you didn't, why would you link to them?

Anyway sorry for the rambling but where the links are duplicated, nofollow, otherwise there's no need.

In my Moz site crawl there is a fluctuating number of 302 redirect pages that don't physically exist - most are through a 'compare product' option. The number of 302s varies significantly by how many pages Rogerbot has crawled - the more pages crawled, the higher the number of 302s, so I'm pretty sure it's the 'compare product' that's causing the issue.

I can't find a way to remove the compare product button so I need another way to resolve it.  I can;t canonicalise the pages as they don't exist as such. Does anyone have any ideas?

Hey Janet,

Like Jordan says, putting a bit of content around each to provide a bit of background info about each service would be good, rather than just a list of links to other companies.

About the follow / nofollow issue, as long as the sites aren't spammy, there shouldn't be a need to nofollow them. I've heard it reinforced several times recently that as long as you trust the website you're linking to, there's no need to nofollow the link. Adding a nofollow to the link is like saying to search engines, 'I don't trust this guy' - but if you didn't, why would you link to them?

Anyway sorry for the rambling but where the links are duplicated, nofollow, otherwise there's no need.

Hey Steven,

Good question! I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this too.

When it comes to categories, I think as long as there's no keyword cannibalisation taking place and users can still easily find what they're looking for within 1 or 2 clicks from the homepage, there's not too much of an issue with creating them. But it could affect how many of your product pages get indexed, as crawlers might use their resource indexing your categories instead. That might not be the case or 100% correct, but it's something to bear in mind.

As long as your categories are logical, make sense to the end user and don't overlap with other categories much, you should be fine.

Hi Sergey,

You're spot on with the question and to be honest I feel a bit daft for not thinking of parameters before! (Doh!) But it doesn't seem to be an issue with Google - only other bots like Moz and Screaming Frog seem to pick it up which strikes me as strange.

Thanks for your answer though - very helpful!