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
-
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Schema markup concerning category pages on an ecommerce site
We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LesleyPaone2 -
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 -
Google Rich Snippets in E-commerce Category Pages
Hello Best Practice for rich snippets / structured data in ecommerce category pages? I put structured markup in the category pages and it seems to have negatively impacted SEO. Webmaster tools is showing about 2.5:1 products to pages ratio. Should I be putting structured data in category Pages at all? Thanks for your time 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | s_EOgi_Bear0 -
Should my back links go to home page or internal pages
Right now we rank on page 2 for many KWs, so should i now focus my attention on getting links to my home page to build domain authority or continue to direct links to the internal pages for specific KWs? I am about to write some articles for several good ranking sites and want to know whether to link my company name (same as domain name) or KW to the home page or use individual KWs to the internal pages - I am only allowed one link per article to my site. Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
How long takes to a page show up in Google results after removing noindex from a page?
Hi folks, A client of mine created a new page and used meta robots noindex to not show the page while they are not ready to launch it. The problem is that somehow Google "crawled" the page and now, after removing the meta robots noindex, the page does not show up in the results. We've tried to crawl it using Fetch as Googlebot, and then submit it using the button that appears. We've included the page in sitemap.xml and also used the old Google submit new page URL https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url Does anyone know how long will it take for Google to show the page AFTER removing meta robots noindex from the page? Any reliable references of the statement? I did not find any Google video/post about this. I know that in some days it will appear but I'd like to have a good reference for the future. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabioricotta-840380 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
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