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 -
Htaccess - Redirecting TAG or Category pages
Hello Fellow Moz's, We have an issue redirecting some /TAG and /Category pages to inner pages. As an example we use: RedirectMatch 301 /category/Sample-Category(.*) https://OurDomain.com.au/New-Page//$1 That works well. The issue is we have other categories and tags that are named similar to /Sample-Category As an example, if we try to redirect /Sample-Category-1 to /New-Page-1 - it will not work, and redirects to /New-Page I assume this is because /Sample-Category is already being redirected, so anything after /Sample-Category like -1 or -2 or -3 etc, will not be recognized. Anyone know of a workaround?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jes-Extender-Australia0 -
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
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 -
My blog is indexing only the archive and category pages
Hi there MOZ community. I am new to the QandA and have a question. I have a blog Its been live for months - but I can not get the posts to rank in the serps. Oddly only the categories rank. The posts are crawled it seems - but seen as less important for a reason I don't understand. Can anyone here help with this? See here for what i mean. I have had several wp sites rank well in the serps - and the posts do much better. Than the categories or archives - super odd. Thanks to all for help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | walletapp0 -
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How to Remove Joomla Canonical and Duplicate Page Content
I've attempted to follow advice from the Q&A section. Currently on the site www.cherrycreekspine.com, I've edited the .htaccess file to help with 301s - all pages redirect to www.cherrycreekspine.com. Secondly, I'd added the canonical statement in the header of the web pages. I have cut the Duplicate Page Content in half ... now I have a remaining 40 pages to fix up. This is my practice site to try and understand what SEOmoz can do for me. I've looked at some of your videos on Youtube ... I feel like I'm scrambling around to the Q&A and the internet to understand this product. I'm reading the beginners guide.... any other resources would be helpful.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deskstudio0