Site Category structure detrimental to SEO?

[timsilver]

Hi Guys,

I am hoping that you may be able to help with an internal debate on whether our currently category structuring could be damaging from an SEO point of view.

Our site sells t shirts primarily and as such we have a large product base of around 7000+ products. Our category structure currently works like so:

Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/

Which I think is fairly typical, though this where it gets interesting, within this end category of "/TV/" there are around 120 categories that are used from a filtration point of view to contain items for each specific show etc, IE Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Breaking_Bad, Mens/T-Shirts/Movie&TV/TV/Game_of_Thrones. The vast majority of these categories have between 1 and 3 products within them and the rest higher.

Multiply this by the large amount of categories that we have on site and these end level "Band Title" categories amount to around 13,000+ categories in the directory.

If at this point we put the filtration element aside, what is the communities opinion of the benefits or drawbacks of having the category structure like this?

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[WebElaine]

Search engines tend to reward sites that have more comprehensive pages, so I tend to think these category pages are detrimental. Besides creating too many pages with very little content, they're all competing amongst themselves and probably appear as duplicate content - there's likely to be more HTML for your header and footer on the page than actual content.

From a user experience, I'd also personally get frustrated clicking through that many times to get to what I want only to find there are so few products in that category. Or if I hopped straight there from a Google search, onto a page with so few products, I'd be likely not to stick around long. I'd rather see more and narrow it down myself.

I would suggest doing one of two things:

A - Filter dynamically. Instead of having all these as permanent pages, have the TV category as the last permanent page, and use checkboxes to filter down. That way you're going to a dynamic URL, not a static one. So basically, your customers get the benefit of seeing the set of products they want, but it's not a permanent "page" on your website that would get indexed. Depends heavily on what technology you're using as to how difficult this would be to change.

B - If you can't filter dynamically, it might be easier for you to add meta noindex tags, or update robots.txt, to block everything below the TV category. You'll still have pages where customers can see their narrow set of products, but the meta tags or robots.txt will tell spiders not to link to pages that far down.

As a side note, special characters in URLs are not a best practice, so I'd get rid of the ampersands if possible.

[Mobilio]

This isn't answer but you need to read that articles:
https://moz.com/blog/pruning-your-ecommerce-site
https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
http://www.stateofdigital.com/optimising-urls-seo-ux/

And reading that could increase internal debates about your information architecture of site or silo structure.