Need Advice on Categorizing Posts, Using Topics, Site Navigation & Structure

[naturalsociety]

Hey there,

My site had terrible categorization.

I did a redesign, and essentially decided to start over using Topics instead of categories - which appear as my site's main navigation. Now I need to assign a Topic to all my posts.

Is it safe to assign posts to multiple parent Topics from an SEO point of view? I want to do it since it would be helpful for users to find them in multiple locations some of the time, but I certainly don't want any SEO issues.

Also, should I de-categorize all of my posts since I'm assigning them to my new hierarchical taxonomy - Topics?

This is very important to finalize. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

• Mike

[willcritchlow]

It sounds as though you should be OK in that case - if they are all site.com/post, then it shouldn't matter how many categories they are in.

In theory you can have Topics and Categories - it all depends on how the site is set up, but I would probably say it's best to focus your efforts on one if I had to guess without knowing the site and all the considerations inside out.

Good luck.

[naturalsociety]

Hey!

Thanks for your insight Will.

1. So, all my post URLs are straight off the root domain, i.e. site.com/post, but my developer says we are using a hierarchical taxonomy.

The URL's would remain the same whether appearing in 1 or several parent categories from the user-point-of-view.

I can't draw conclusions here as I'm not well-versed enough, but am trying to provide more information.

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2. In addition to the multiple-topic-assigning issue, I'm also not sure if I should be de-categorizing my posts since I'm using Topics as my new hierarchical taxonomy.

Or maybe I should just scratch Topics since I haven't even delved deep into them yet and just work with my current sub-par categories and expand on that.

So confused.

Thank you!!!!!!!!!!

• Mike

[willcritchlow]

Hi there,

The answer to this depends a little bit on how your CMS / website treats content that appears in multiple categories. The "correct" way of it working is that those pages are still accessible at only one URL (i.e. not at both /category1/slug and /category2/slug ). This is normally achieved either by having a primary category that appears in the URL (and then having that content also appear on the category2 page but not with category2 in the URL) or by having the content available at /slug and appearing on both category1 and category2 pages.

Assuming this is the case, then it's perfectly safe to have content appear in more than one category.

If not, you could investigate whether you can add a rel=canonical link from secondary categories to the primary category. This would be OK but you might want to limit it only to times when content really needs to be in both categories otherwise you may waste crawl budget depending on the scale of your site.

I actually wrote a post about the difference between URL structure and site architecture that you might find useful.