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
-
Blog post generating irrelevant traffic. What should I do with it?
I have a blog post that has been generating more than 75% of my website's traffic month over month.-averaging about 1000 views a month. Awesome that so many people are finding and benefiting from this post, however it is really skewing my traffic. I have an 87% bounce rate, and I'm only ranking in terms related to this post as opposed to industry related terms. I'm not sure what to do with this blog post. I want to be able to better evaluate my website's performance and be sure I'm targeting the right audience in order to gain more leads. Would a 'noindex' or 'nofollow' be appropriate here? Thanks!
Content Development | | Ali_DeLeg0 -
Internal blog with history and some SEO value versus new external blogs with specialized content?
We operate a blog inside a folder on our site and considering the launch of 4 highly focused blogs with specialized content which are now categories on the internal blog. Wondering if there is more value in using the external new blogs or just keep growing the internal blog content. Does fact that the internal blog is buried amongst millions of pages have any impact if we want the content indexed and value given to the links from the blog content to our main site pages.
Content Development | | CondoRich0 -
References for Healthcare Blog Content?
Hey everyone, We have a couple B2C medical/healthcare clients we produce content for and I was wondering what the industry stance is when it comes to giving references at the end of a blog, assuming there were no statistics or direct quotes used in the content. A lot of our content is written via research on a specific condition/treatment and doesn't really dive deep into specific medical nuances. Things like risks, recovery timelines, questions to ask, etc. are written about mostly. Still, should we be providing general references at the end of blogs to sites like WebMD, Medscape, etc. Thanks for any input!
Content Development | | danielreyes0 -
Blog.site.com vs site.com/blog
Which is better for SEO: blog.site.com or site.com/blog. In other words, is it better to have the blog running in a subdomain or as a director within the main site? Right now we are running as a subdomain, but want to be sure Google isn't considering that a separate site. The blog shows up separately on Google Analytics, which makes me think site.com/blog is better if for no other reason, it would give our domain greater traffic. Not sure if this matters, but some site info: our site is a sharing economy tool for renting your stuff we are running the blog on Wordpress blog traffic is about 5% of total traffic
Content Development | | TapGoods0 -
How do I fix a broken link to a product category page in wordpress?
We are building a new site currently at http://67.222.109.48/~cheapnan/ I started doing some SEO after the developer I hired failed to do it even though it was in the agreement. I did our old site so I should be able to do this but I am new to wordpress. Now when i go to the products tab at the top of the page the first 2 have broken links, I checked the rest and there are 3 total that I need to fix. I am unsure how to access the navigation so I can fix the links. Please tell me where to look.
Content Development | | cheaptubes0 -
Locating Guest Blogging Niches
Hey Folks, Does anybody have advice on tools I could use to locate blogs on specific topics? My plan is to approach the webmasters and offer guest blogging services. I know I could just do a google search for something like "KEYWORD blogs" but I thought I'd see if there is anything more sophisticated out there. Thanks, Rich
Content Development | | Rich-O0 -
Moving a html site into Wordpress
I'm getting ready to move a site into Wordpress. The current or old site is built with static html pages. My question is, how should I handle Google with these old pages. Should I 301 redirect from each old page to the new? Or is there a better way to handle it?
Content Development | | brandco0 -
Sourcing content and images for Office Interior Design Blog
Im currently building a blog on Wordpress, and I will be blogging about Office Interior Designs. When I look at my competition they have some great blog posts about office interior designs and I have no idea about how they get: a) The ideas to blog about, how do they find out about these office interior designs b) how they get the content for them, how do they know what to write about each one, do they need permission etc, c) if i am interested in doing a blog on the same office interior design as them, how can I get information )and permission from the company that done the office interior design) on the office interior design so i can blog about it and also how do i get the images and stuff. an example is http://www.officedesignblog.com/invensys-rail-office-concept/726/ I would like to cover this aswell, as i think my future readers would like to know about this. how did they get the images, and the information about the project so they could write a blog post about it? And how would I go about doing the same thing?
Content Development | | CompleteOffice1