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.
Category Pages & Content
-
Hi
Does anyone have any great examples of an ecommerce site which has great content on category pages or product listing pages?
Thanks!
-
Hi
This is great, thank you for responding

Some really good examples!
Becky
-
Some other examples that come to mind, since it seems that so many ecommerce site owners overlook this opportunity:
- Home Depot - note how this top level category page - http://www.homedepot.com/b/Building-Materials/N-5yc1vZaqns and also a sub-category such as http://www.homedepot.com/b/Building-Materials-Drywall/N-5yc1vZar3d include great images, helpful tools, the actual products for that category, and also descriptive text at the bottom. All a shining example of ecommerce category pages with great SEO
- REI doesn't try to optimize as much as Home Depot but they do a good job as well - https://www.rei.com/h/cycling
- This is a decent example of a B2B site including some optimization on a category page - http://www.coastalcreative.com/product-category/large-format-prints/
- A good example of a category page not feeling like one - http://www.chameleoncoldbrew.com/our-coffees/ready-to-drink/
Those come to mind first. It actually is hard finding ecommerce sites that do category page SEO perfectly!
-
Great thank you for the detailed response

I also wanted to find out what opinions were on hub pages/user guides over category page content - management don't want the content to detract from products, so are hub pages the solution?
My only concern is that all this new content, will also take time to rank so will it in fact help the category pages enough as adding content to the category page itself?
Thanks!
-
(**I'm really sorry for the awful formatting of this comment. I'm having a really hard time getting the formatting to cooperate at all. I swear it's not user error but then again I could be wrong). Great question, Becky. I hope more people respond with good examples (Duluth Trading did not impress me, sorry Jordan). We're always searching for examples of ecommerce sites that do great on-page optimization on their category and product pages. It seems easy to find ecommerce sites with great design and intuitive filtering but rarely any that do any "next-level SEO" - which therein probably lies the answer that you don't "SEO" a page or page template, it happens by good design and functionality. We realize that, but it's still an on-going hunt to find any ecommerce sites that do anything unique or clever with the optimization of their content.
On-page aspects we look for are as follows:
Internal Linking:
- how many
- what anchor text
External Linking:
- do-follow or no-follow
- how many
- what anchor text
- target="_blank"
Description Copy:
- how many words, format
- how many subheadings
- formatting of subheadings
- do they link in subheadings
Images:
- how many
- what size
- alt text
- file name
- title and/or caption
Headings:
- how many h1s, h2s, h3s
- how many characters
- how many keywords
- how many variations of keywords
Structured Data:
- what do they markup with schema
- any schema that we're not already doing
Social Buttons:
- what social do they offer sharing to
- any unique or clever social share enablement
- do they offer text link to phone (a favorite of mine)
- email to friend
I'm sure there's even more to consider but that was my top-of-mind list. If I find or think of any good examples I'll come back and comment. I'm sorry that I don't have any great examples but I did want to chime-in to say that I think your question is a great one. Thanks.
edit: Someone linked to ModCloth in the comments on the Moz FB page that posted your question in the feed. From a simply design perspective, which is not my forte, ModCloth impressed me. Also, The Tie Bar. I'm also really impressed with The Wirecutter and their sister-site, The Sweethome.
-
Duluth trading co has some good examples of product level page content. However there isnt a lot of category level content on most pages. But I think they have some good examples and ideas anyone can borrow from.
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
-
Rel canonical tag from shopify page to wordpress site page
We have pages on our shopify site example - https://shop.example.com/collections/cast-aluminum-plaques/products/cast-aluminum-address-plaque That we want to put a rel canonical tag on to direct to our wordpress site page - https://www.example.com/aluminum-plaques/ We have links form the wordpress page to the shop page, and over time ahve found that google has ranked the shop pages over the wp pages, which we do not want. So we want to put rel canonical tags on the shop pages to say the wp page is the authority. I hope that makes sense, and I would appreciate your feeback and best solution. Thanks! Is that possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shabbirmoosa0 -
How can I avoid duplicate content for a new landing page which is the same as an old one?
Hello mozers! I have a question about duplicate content for you... One on my clients pages have been dropping in search volume for a while now, and I've discovered it's because the search term isn't as popular as it used to be. So... we need to create a new landing page using a more popular search term. The page which is losing traffic is based on the search query "Can I put a solid roof on my conservatory" this only gets 0-10 searches per month according to the keyword explorer tool. However, if we changed this to "replacing conservatory roof with solid roof" this gets up to 500 searches per month. Muuuuch better! The issue is, I don't want to close down and re-direct the old page because it's got a featured snippet and sits in position 1. So I'd like to create another page instead... however, as the two are effectively the same content, I would then land myself in a duplicate content issue. If I were to put a rel="canonical" tag in the original "can I put a solid roof...." page but say the master page is now the new one, would that get around the issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz0 -
JSON-LD schema markup for a category landing page
I'm working on some schema for a client and have a question regarding the use of schema for a high-level category page. This page is merely the main lander for Categories. For example: https://www.examples.com/pages/categories And all it does is list links to the three main categories (Men's, Women's, Kid's) - it's a clothing store. This is the code I have right now. In short, simply using type @Itemlist and an array that uses @ListItem. Structured Data Testing Tool returns no errors with it, but my main question is this: Is this the _correct _way to do a page like this, or are there better options? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alces0 -
URL structure - Page Path vs No Page Path
We are currently re building our URL structure for eccomerce websites. We have seen a lot of site removing the page path on product pages e.g. https://www.theiconic.co.nz/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html versus what would normally be https://www.theiconic.co.nz/womens-clothing-tops/liberty-beach-blossom-shirt-680193.html Should we be removing the site page path for a product page to keep the url shorter or should we keep it? I can see that we would loose the hierarchy juice to a product page but not sure what is the right thing to do.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ashcastle0 -
Same product in different categories and duplicate content issues
Hi,I have some questions related to duplicate content on e-commerce websites. 1)If a single product goes to multiple categories (eg. A black elegant dress could be listed in two categories like "black dresses" and "elegant dresses") is it considered duplicate content even if the product url is unique? e.g www.website.com/black-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/elegant-dresses/black-elegant-dress duplicated> same content from two different paths www.website.com/black-elegant-dress unique url > this is the way my products urls look like Does google perceive this as duplicated content? The path to the content is only one, so it shouldn't be seen as duplicated content, though the product is repeated in different categories.This is the most important concern I actually have. It is a small thing but if I set this wrong all website would be affected and thus penalised, so I need to know how I can handle it. 2- I am using wordpress + woocommerce. The website is built with categories and subcategories. When I create a product in the product page backend is it advisable to select just the lowest subcategory or is it better to select both main category and subcategory in which the product belongs? I usually select the subcategory alone. Looking forward to your reply and suggestions. thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cinzia091 -
Can noindexed pages accrue page authority?
My company's site has a large set of pages (tens of thousands) that have very thin or no content. They typically target a single low-competition keyword (and typically rank very well), but the pages have a very high bounce rate and are definitely hurting our domain's overall rankings via Panda (quality ranking). I'm planning on recommending we noindexed these pages temporarily, and reindex each page as resources are able to fill in content. My question is whether an individual page will be able to accrue any page authority for that target term while noindexed. We DO want to rank for all those terms, just not until we have the content to back it up. However, we're in a pretty competitive space up against domains that have been around a lot longer and have higher domain authorities. Like I said, these pages rank well right now, even with thin content. The worry is if we noindex them while we slowly build out content, will our competitors get the edge on those terms (with their subpar but continually available content)? Do you think Google will give us any credit for having had the page all along, just not always indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | THandorf0 -
Is a different location in page title, h1 title, and meta description enough to avoid Duplicate Content concern?
I have a dynamic website which will have location-based internal pages that will have a <title>and <h1> title, and meta description tag that will include the subregion of a city. Each page also will have an 'info' section describing the generic product/service offered which will also include the name of the subregion. The 'specific product/service content will be dynamic but in some cases will be almost identical--ie subregion A may sometimes have the same specific content result as subregion B. Will the difference of just the location put in each of the above tags be enough for me to avoid a Duplicate Content concern?</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | couponguy0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0