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.
How many categories should you have within a blog / Wordpress Site for SEO?
-
Hi Guys
I am just wondering whether or not for SEO purposes it is better to have a small number of categories for your blog posts to fit into as opposed to numerous ones. The reason I ask is that I have one site which is fairly new to the search engines - 8 months old which has 7 general categories within the blog for instance "rail contractors", "railway construction" "airport construction" etc I have another site which is 10 years old which has built up 25 different types of categories for instance brand design, brand development, brand management (i guess you could put all these under 1 category "branding"? We've been writing lots of press for both sites... yet the younger site is getting more coverage on Google page 1. Would this be because the blogs / press are more concentrated under a specific category as opposed to being spread thinly throughout the site? Any help would be appreciated.
Debs
-
The number of categories on your blog can grow over time if you write about a diversity of topics. To justify a category you should have a few existing posts in that category or anticipate generating a few posts within a reasonable amount of time.
Extremely active blogs can support, and probably should have, a large diversity of categories simply to organize the content better and gain keyword reach in the search engines.
Another factor is the power of your site. If you have a new site without a lot of power then busting out 100 categories could be like dead weight on your entire site.
I have a blog that over the past several years has received 25 to 60 posts per week. It has over 150 categories and each post goes into at least two categories (one for geographic location and one for topic area). Most of the blog's search engine traffic flows in through category pages because they rank well for high traffic terms.
-
The number of categories you have on your WordPress blog should accurately reflect the content you write about. If you have a legitimate need for 50 categories, then by all means, 50 categories it is. If your content all falls under 5 categories, then that is all you should need.
Essentially, let your content dictate how many categories your blog has. Remember to look out for duplicate content, or pages with little to no content. It's possible that you have a single blog post that is tagged to two categories - and those categories have no other posts attributed to them. The category pages will then show short excerpts of the content (little to no content), and be essentially identical because the same post is tied to them (duplicate content).
-
Define the goal for your blog, categorize as appropriate for keywords and the content you will need to create to achieve your goal and then, create your blog posts to fit within your categories.
As far as which is getting more traffic and why, is the traffic you're looking at going to category pages or individual blog posts? More "coverage on Google page 1" doesn't mean anything if it's not earning traffic to the site. Are the blog posts bringing in search traffic? If they are and that traffic is going to the individual posts, then it may be that the posts are better optimizer or the topics you're writing about on the new blog are better chosen. If you're seeing traffic going to the category pages for category keywords on one site but not the other, maybe your keyword research for the category pages wasn't done well enough, maybe you just have to give it more time, or maybe you have to take a look at your internal and external links to see why one site is out performing the other.
-
You should have as many as you need. Do not create categories if there are no articles you can place within them. But do not group unrelated articles under the same category. Check into some keyword research to see if your broader categories get search volume and go from there.
For the example you gave, I would say to keep them all under a "branding" category and expand into those other keywords through articles.
If you have a more broad category it may get linked to more since it has more articles people may want. Therefore increasing its PA and ranks
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
-
New blog contributors
For context my website is a content resource portal. In SEO training I have been told that it is a good SEO move to have as many content contributors as possible. As a result we are pushing to recruit new content contributors so they can be listed as new contributors/authors on our site alongside their valuable content. Would this move be good for our SEO rankings and is there anything in particular to consider with this?
Content Development | | Chanice0 -
Blog.xyz.com
I have a site that is running its blog on www.blog.xyz.com and I am looking for ways to increase Google traffic. Would it be better to running the blog on something like: www.xyz.com/blog instead?
Content Development | | kevgrand0 -
Recommendations on the URL Structure When Posting Blogs
Sites are adopting different URL structures for posting blogs (examples below). Quicksprout ( www.domain.com/dateposted/blogposttitle) Moz (www.domain.com/blog/blogposttitle) SEO Book (www.domain.com/blogposttitle) What do you recommend?
Content Development | | SEO5Team0 -
Can We Publish Duplicate Content on Multi Regional Website / Blogs?
Today, I was reading Google's official article on Multi Regional website and use of duplicate content. Right now, We are working on 4 different blogs for following regions. And, We're writing unique content for each blog. But, I am thinking to use one content / subject for all 4 region blogs. USA: http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/ UK: http://www.bannerbuzz.co.uk/blog/ AUS: http://www.bannerbuzz.com.au/blog/ CA: http://www.bannerbuzz.ca/blog/ Let me give you very clear ideas on it. Recently, We have published one article on USA website. http://www.bannerbuzz.com/blog/choosing-the-right-banner-for-your-advertisement/ And, We want to publish this article / blog on UK, AUS & CA blog without making any changes. I have read following paragraph on Google's official guidelines and It's inspire me to make it happen. Which is best solution for it? Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
Content Development | | CommercePundit0 -
How many words per page?
I know this has been answered before, but I don't think it has been in about a year (and we all know how quickly the SEO landscape can change). We're having a little debate on it right now and I'd be curious to get some feedback from the community. What is the minimum number of words you would use on a page? Does it matter to you if it's a second tier (website.com/x) or third tier (website.com/x/y) page? It's always a tough sell on design between trying to keep it clean and trying to provide a lot of useful information. I'd be curious what your thoughts are. Thanks! -Adam
Content Development | | AdamWormann1 -
Pages and categories with the same name?
I manage a wordpress based site that is needing to under go a site architecture overhaul. the site is christ.org and one of the problems is it has 89 pages but really only 4 are navigatable (not a word apparently). The site also has over 400 posts so categories and parent pages are both definitely needed. One option is I convert a lot of the pages into posts, but would that happen to break any links pointing to those pages turned posts? Or another option is to keep the pages and posts and create a bunch of subpages, then I would most likely end up with similarly named categories and top level pages. I would guess the name of the category needs to be unique from page titles right? And not just unique but very much differentiated than any page title (not posts but page titles). Maybe what I need to do is convert the pages that are not really unique into posts and put them in the category it fits with. And then keep those that are unique as top level pages. The architecture needs some serious work I think 🙂 Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Content Development | | ThridHour0 -
H1 tag in Blank in Wordpress website
Good evening, I have noticed using some h1 checkers, that my primary h1 tag is blank. I manually introduced an h1 with my main keywords, but system recognises as 2 different h1 tags, and therefore it could be harmful for my SEO purposes. I created my wordpress website using Artisteer. Is there any specific way (or plugin) to change this primary h1 tag so it wont appear as blank? My site is www.outletspain.net Thanks in advance Maria Jesus
Content Development | | goperformancelabs0 -
Should I Have No Index, No Follow On Blog Category & Tag Pages?
At some point in the past I read or was told that No Index, No Follow tags on category and tag pages were a good thing on a standard WordPress blog in order to prevent duplicate content issues. Is this still true or was it ever true?
Content Development | | eTundra0
