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.
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
-
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have.
Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products.
My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
-
All the categories are based on what my customers search for in my nav or based on what discovery related keywords they search for.
My worry is that this is endless, as there are literally thousands of categories that I could be creating.
If you have 5 or more products that are relevant to a keyword, should you not create a category for your customers to find, rather than just a product page, (offering your customers more options)?
Thanks,
-
As MrLeeB said, users may not be able to find what they're looking for and there would likely be some unnecessary wasting of "crawl budget", which could have an negative impact on indexation and rankings.
As Mike R. said, it would probably be terrible for the user-experience, and thus rankings and conversion rates, if you had too many categories.
For many years eCommerce businesses have built out category pages based on internal-searches performed by visitors, as well as the keywords they used to find the site on search engines. When used sparingly, this strategy can help inform the category structure of the site while offering a landing page for high-value keywords.
It can help copywriters understand which pain points and questions are trying to be solved, thus which should be called-out as benefits of the products within the category. It can even inform which products you source or develop to sell.
When abused, like when software, website code or database logic automates the process of creating these pages, the results can be devastating to the business.
After a few months of long-tail growth, the site may experience a major ranking loss across the entire domain for all but clearly branded and hyper-long-tail searches. If you are in the game of burn-n-churn, it might work for you provided you pay for some seed-traffic to build out the keyword lists.
...just in case you were thinking down that path.
-
Are the categories helpful for the customer? On one hand you don't want to lump too many things into one category when they can be broken out into more granular categories that better serve visitors. On the other hand, it won't help you or your customers if you get too granular and break everything out into categories based on the mot insignificant details.
While keyword cannibalization is a concern, serving your visitors/customers what they want and how they prefer to see it will likely improve metrics more on your site than concerning yourself with a nebulous concept like "how many categories is too many." If you have 200 different categories but they are well targeted and you want to add another (or ten more) that are also equally well targeted, then why wouldn't you do it?
-
Hey Steven,
Good question! I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this too.
When it comes to categories, I think as long as there's no keyword cannibalisation taking place and users can still easily find what they're looking for within 1 or 2 clicks from the homepage, there's not too much of an issue with creating them. But it could affect how many of your product pages get indexed, as crawlers might use their resource indexing your categories instead. That might not be the case or 100% correct, but it's something to bear in mind.
As long as your categories are logical, make sense to the end user and don't overlap with other categories much, you should be fine.
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
-
So many links from single site?
this guy is ranking on all high volume keywords and has low quality content, he has 1600 ref domains check the attachment how did he get so many links from single site is he gonna be penalized YD2BvQ0
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SIMON-CULL0 -
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Too many backlinks from one domain?
I've been in the process of creating a tourism-based website for the state of Kansas. I'm a photographer for the state, and have inked a nice little side income to my day job as a web designer by selling prints from Kansas (along with my travels elsewhere). I'm still in the process of developing it, but it's at least at a point that I need to really start thinking about SEO factor of the amount of backlinks I have from it going back to my main photography website. The Kansas site is at http://www.kansasisbeautiful.com and my photography website is http://www.mickeyshannon.com. This tourism website will serve a number of purposes: To promote the state and show people it's not just a flat, boring place. To help promote my photography. The entire site is powered by my photography. To sell a book I'm planning to publish later this year/early next year of Kansas images. To help increase sales of photography prints of my work. What I'm worried about is the amount of backlinks I have going from the Kansas site to my photography site. Not to mention every image is hosted on my photography domain (no need to upload to two domains when one can serve the same purpose). I'm currently linking back to my site on most pages via a little "Like the Photos? Buy a print" link in the top right corner. In addition, when users get to the website map, all photo listings click back to a page on my photography site that they can purchase prints. And the main navigation also has a link for "Photos" that takes them to my Kansas photo galleries on my photography website as well. The question I have: Is it really bad SEO-wise to have anywhere from 1 to 10+ backlinks on every page from one domain (kansasisbeautiful.com) linking back to mickeyshannon.com? Would I be better served moving all of the content from kansasisbeautiful into a subdirectory on my photography site (mickeyshannon.com/kansas/) and redirecting the entire domain there? I haven't actually launched this website yet, so I'm trying to make the right call before pushing it to the public. Any advice would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | msphoto0 -
Google cache is showing my UK homepage site instead of the US homepage and ranking the UK site in US
Hi There, When I check the cache of the US website (www.us.allsaints.com) Google returns the UK website. This is also reflected in the US Google Search Results when the UK site ranks for our brand name instead of the US site. The homepage has hreflang tags only on the homepage and the domains have been pointed correctly to the right territories via Google Webmaster Console.This has happened before in 26th July 2015 and was wondering if any had any idea why this is happening or if any one has experienced the same issueFDGjldR
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adzhass0 -
Multilingual Site and 301 redirection
Hey there awesome people of Moz I have this site that has many languages in it. The main language is English and my developer did the following www.example.com ( is the main site ) which redirects with a 301 to www.example.com/en if your geo location is supported by our languages then you will automatically be redirected to whatever language you have in your country but does the first language with is english have to 301 redirect to www.example.com/en ? I thought that the right way is to just leave /en at the root file. Thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis0 -
Regional and Global Site
We have numerous versions of what is basically the same site, that targets different countries, such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa. These websites use Tlds to designate the region, for example, co.uk, co.za I believe this is sufficient (with a little help from Google Webmastertools) to convince the search engines what site is for what region. My question is how do we tell the search engines to send traffic from other regions besides the above to our global site, which would have a .com TLD. For example, we don't have a Brazilian site, how do we drive traffic from Brazil to our global .com site? Many thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Clickmetrics0 -
Micro sites?
Hi, I have been speaking to seo firms regarding strategies and they mentioned setting up micro sites under domains that are relevant. i.e setting up armanidoamin.co.uk and we use it as a blog type site to update all info, product reviews, news relating to armani. Whats peoples thoughts on this? Does it work? Is it worth the effort? Im not so sure but obviously looking for ideas. Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
Is the eCommerce site Shopify SEO friendly?
We ave a prospect client that wants to start doing SEO for his Shopify site, we are unsure if this will be SEO friendly. Will we have enough control to get great placement? Are we better off rebuilding the site for the client in an OpenCart?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0