Do product sub-categories compete with top level categories for rankings?
-
Hi All,
This question is for an eccomerce site with a very large sku count (over 3million individual sku's). As the person responsible for SEO on the site, I am often playing catchup to some of our web merchandisers. My question is this: Will creating sub-catagories that have a page title and H1 tag that include the top level category name plus a refinement be competing with each other and the top level category for rankings?
The products that I am specifically talking about are Funko Pops! (some of you might collect them). There are different sub-sets of Funko Pops such as Funko Pop!: Rocks, Funko Pop!: Movies, Funko Pop! Television ect. Im worried that if I create many pages with these titles/h1 tags that they will end up competing for the query "funko pops"... something I worked hard to rank above Amazon for. Any thoughts would be appreciated!
-
Hi Jason,
Don't tear apart your subcategories into subdomains. It is much likely to perform poorly and cannibalize your search terms.
I'm working in XXXL e-commerce where there are over 30 subdomains for each country. We found that this configuration isn't good enough to compete with other big players, on google search.
So, we've run some test and found that moving from subdomain to subfolder into a bigger subdomain pays in traffic.That said, I'd focus more on checking what your main competitors are doing. There might be a lot of opportunities optimizing what content you are offering users.
A tip, check how their and you are rendering for mobile views. There might be a low hanging fruit over there. Unless you are already doing that
Hope that helps.
Best luck.
GR
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
-
General drop in rankings
We've made a LOT of improvements to our on page SEO and we've been on the right track, but since about 26/7 our rankings appears to have gone down. Since early 2015 we've reworked a lot of the copy on our site to improve the unique/duplicate ratio, we've redone a lot of urls that didn't make any sense. We've improved image alt-text and file names. We've reduced image size on most of the site and we have disavowed spam links (obvious ones like nike shoes and oakley glasses). We've basically improved on-site SEO as much as we can with headers and whatnot. We've been hacked 4 times since January and we had two partial manual penalties from Google, but they were quickly dealt with and we've switched server to one that is both safer and a lot faster. Most of the hacked content seems to have disappeared from Googles index but not all of it. We have also tried our best to deal with URL parameters and we've made 301's out of hundreds of URLs with duplicate content from old slideshows that basically only had an image. And there's even more things we've done like working a lot more with social media, but despite all that were loosing ranking every week and our SEOlytics SVR is at its lowest since early 2014. And we've never (afaik) bought links or anything like that. Obviously we're doing something wrong but frankly we're running out of ideas. We've lost rankings on individual important phrases but there's site-wide general drop.
On-Page Optimization | | Emil_780 -
Rankings drop since switch to https
Switched hosting companies, and then switched to https for the entire marketing site as a result of needing the security for the signups. Rankings in several (most areas) have tanked since then. Site hasn't changed otherwise, is responsive, fast, and spidered well. See: http://pisoftware.com I FEEL like the redirection is being handled properly, but I can't be sure. Moz reporting duplicate content on the homepage between http and https - but I honestly don't know why. Any help - ANY - is appreciated. Hair being pulled out, and I don't think I'll look good completely bald. 🙂 Kelly
On-Page Optimization | | Kellster0 -
H2s & H3s for Category Navigation
Hi all. I am wondering how best to format a category navigation menu. Currently I don't think we're using H2s correctly on our website. Am I right to think that the top level category e.g. Games should be formatted as an H2 and the sub-categories underneath this should be formatted as H3s (to show a hierarchy)? Is there a limit on how many H2s and H3s you should use? Obviously only one H1 per page. Thanks in advance Paul
On-Page Optimization | | kevinliao0 -
Related products
How many related products should maximum I have on the product pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BridalHotspot
I see a lot of conflicting answers on many blogs. Hope that someone can help me out!0 -
On Site Problem Caused Rankings To Drop?
I'm getting to the bottom of why my site dropped rankings on the 9th March. I noticed that in google there is a cached version of my site on 9th March at 8.37am which is when my rankings dissapeared. Presumably this is when google last crawled my site? I guess this means that google found something on the home page or on the site that it didn't like? I wonder if anyone can take a look and let me know if there's anything obvious. Could it be a duplicate content penalty as I have lots of categories pulling content from the same posts?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
WordPress and category/subcategory landing pages
Hey, Here's my situation. I'm building a WordPress blog for product reviews of a certain niche. Current category setup is 4 main categories with 4-8 subcategories each. Each subcategory has a unique description that will help it become a landing page for certain keywords, after which it lists the posts from that subcategory. The posts will always be assigned to a sub-category, never to a main category. My issue is what to do with the main categories. They're fairly general so they're not really targeting any keywords, and don't have any unique descriptions attached to them. I was thinking of choosing between three options on designing the main category pages: List the subcategories + normal posts loop that bring the latest posts from the subcategories (may create a lot of duplicate content since the subcategory pages are also listing their posts) List only the subcategories (+ maybe just the latest post from each subcategory) Don't link the main categories at all, instead only use them to create dropdowns for the subcategories So, what would you choose, and why?
On-Page Optimization | | mihaiaperghis0 -
Site is not ranking for a particular keyword !!
One of my site is ranking for all the main keywords except one. This keyword is just a variant of those keywords which are all ranking in top 10 (page 1) in Google. Why is it happening? Does Google punishes site for one keyword. I know competition of keyword matters but other keywords with similar competition are ranking. And even the site is very well optimized for this keyword (titles and site copy without any stuffing) Any Solutions ?
On-Page Optimization | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Ranking for competitor brand terms
We're looking to rank for competitor brand terms and have created competitor brand pages for some of our main competitors. My question is where would be most effective to place these pages on our site? Also, would this be classed as grey hat?
On-Page Optimization | | Sayers1
