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
-
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
How will changing my website's page content affect SEO?
Our company is looking to update the content on our existing web pages and I am curious what the best way to roll out these changes are in order to maintain good SEO rankings for certain pages. The infrastructure of the site will not be modified except for maybe adding a couple new pages, but existing domains will stay the same. If the domains are staying the same does it really matter if I just updated 1 page every week or so, versus updating them all at once? Just looking for some insight into how freshening up the content on the back end pages could potentially hurt SEO rankings initially. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bankable1 -
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 -
Multiple pages optimised for the same keywords but pages are functionally different and visually different
Hi MOZ community! We're wondering what the implications would be on organic ranking by having 2 pages, which have quite different functionality were optimised for the same keywords. So, for example, one of the pages in question is
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TrueluxGroup
https://www.whichledlight.com/categories/led-spotlights
and the other page is
https://www.whichledlight.com/t/led-spotlights both of these pages are basically geared towards the keyword led spotlights the first link essentially shows the options for led spotlights, the different kind of fittings available, and the second link is a product search / results page for all products that are spotlights. We're wondering what the implications of this could be, as we are currently looking to improve the ranking for the site particularly for this keyword. Is this even safe to do? Especially since we're at the bottom of the hill of climbing the ranking ladder of this keyword. Give us a shout if you want any more detail on this to answer more easily 🙂0 -
Trailing Slashes for Magento CMS pages - 2 URLS - Duplicate content
Hello, Can anyone help me find a solution to Fixing and Creating Magento CMS pages to only use one URL and not two URLS? www.domain.com/testpage www.domain.com/testpage/ I found a previous article that applies to my issue, which is using htaccess to redirect request for pages in magento 301 redirect to slash URL from the non-slash URL. I dont understand the syntax fully in htaccess , but I used this code below. This code below fixed the CMS page redirection but caused issues on other pages, like all my categories and products with this error: "This webpage has a redirect loop ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS" Assuming you're running at domain root. Change to working directory if needed. RewriteBase / # www check If you're running in a subdirectory, then you'll need to add that in to the redirected url (http://www.mydomain.com/subdirectory/$1 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iamgreenminded
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L] Trailing slash check Don't fix direct file links RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$
RewriteRule ^(.)$ $1/ [L,R=301] Finally, forward everything to your front-controller (index.php) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule .* index.php [QSA,L]0 -
Is it okay to copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag?
I have heard conflicting answers to this. I always figured that it was okay to selectively copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag.....especially if the onpage content is well written. How can it be duplicate content if it's pulling from the exact same page? Does anybody have any feedback from a credible source about this? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications1 -
How to resolve Duplicate Page Content issue for root domain & index.html?
SEOMoz returns a Duplicate Page Content error for a website's index page, with both domain.com and domain.com/index.html isted seperately. We had a rewrite in the htacess file, but for some reason this has not had an impact and we have since removed it. What's the best way (in an HTML website) to ensure all index.html links are automatically redirected to the root domain and these aren't seen as two separate pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ContentWriterMicky0