Forced to remove Categories with high volume & revenue

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Hi everyone

I've been forced to remove level 4 & 5 categories (e.g. example.com/level-2/level-3**/level-4/level-5/**) from our website, even though they're getting plenty of traffic, revenue and are ranking for some of our keywords. The argument is customers were using refinement/filters more than clicking into categories, and a new backend system is coming into the business and these need to be removed anyway.

We've done this before and seen a drop in visibility, revenue & traffic in these areas, but we're going ahead with another batch of removals anyway. I was wondering if anyone has any experience in fixing a problem like this? I've been told the categories will not be returning and have to 301 them, so need to find a workaround to get eligible for ranking for these Keywords again.

I've been looking at using the refinements to make it look like a category (change URL to a clean one, update Page Title, Meta Description, H1, remove text from core page, when refinement is clicked) but not sure what kind of knock-on effects this will have, if it even works!

Hope you can help! I've probably missed some details so let me  know if you need more  info!!!

Thanks

[willcritchlow]

Very hard to prove these things before they're done - good luck with getting buy-in for what you need to do and in undoing the worst of the damage.

[Frankie-BTDublin]

Thanks Will! Yep sounds similar to what I've sent onto Development, where the filters are actually those sub-category pages.  Unfortunately they think it's going to be a huge amount of work, so now I need to show the value of creating these pages before they start working on it. From the Macro point of view, unfortunately, I had no choice and just had to redirect, which are all in place now. Painful to do when you know it's going to damage the performance, and  after a couple of weeks it looks like the stats showing it already has

But great to have your feedback, will definitely give weight for my pitch to get those filters working for us! The top-level idea might actually be a great workaround for now too!

[willcritchlow]

Hi Frankie,

Sorry for the slow reply to this one. I hope it's still relevant to offer some thoughts.

First, at the top level, I would say that the stated reasons don't necessarily mean that you should not have the kinds of pages you describe. My first preference would be to modify the functionality so that the filters you describe users actually using are those sub-category pages. Even if this meant changing URLs (and hence 301 redirecting the pages you currently have), it is possible to have filter / facet pages be indexable and have unique URLs and meta information.

If that's not possible for whatever reason, I would separate my efforts into the micro and the macro:

1. Micro: apply a 80:20 or 90:10 rule to the pages that you are losing - find the small number of most important and highest traffic / conversion pages and find a way to keep versions of those pages (again - even if you have to 301 redirect them, you could create them as static content pages targeting those keywords or something if you had to)
2. Macro: where you simply have no choice but to lose these pages, I think your best bet will be to redirect them to the absolutely best (/ next best!) page on the site for those queries - these might be other (sub-)category pages or they might be individual products or content pages, but at least for the highest traffic end, it'd be worth specific research effort to identify the best redirect targets

One final thought: it's not always the case that the URL has to represent every level in the hierarchy. I don't know your underlying technology, but it might be possible to recreate some of these sub-categories as top-level categories if products are allowed by your CMS to be in more than one category at once. I wrote this article about the difference between URL structures and site architecture that might give more clarity on what I mean here.