Category Structure Ecom Site

Hey Guys,

Been working with a marketing team to help with SEO on our Magento ecom website. Some unusual things I noticed they been doing with the category structure that I'm trying to understand if it has any relevance or advantage and if there's a reason they're doing it that way. I tried searching online for some information about this, but couldn't find anything.

1.
It seems like they're attempting to have all categories child to only the default category and not in their relevant parent category. I assume it's clean URLs? But does this have any advantage? It makes it a little confusing when organizing. Assuming we sell all types of cloths, Example:

Instead of:
website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/
website.com/jackets/spring-jackets/
website.com/jackets/fall-jackets/

They have it as:
website.com/winter-jackets/
website.com/spring-jackets/
website.com/fall-jackets/

Then on the front end, they set up menus and navigation link to each page as Website > Jackets > Winter Jackets

When clicking the red shirt category, it goes to website.com/winter-jackets/

Is there any advantage to this? I want to clean up and oragnize the categories, but not sure why they're doing it like this. Tranditionally I'm used to the category structure/paths just matching the way we set up the navigation.

2.
Also the second part is, for some categories, they haven't created them as categories at all. They've created links with filters applied from a main category that contains all items, then added them to a landing page. So they're not real categories, but on the front end can be navigated to and lands you on the filtered page. Example:

Landing page:
website.com/shop-by-color/

Links to not real categories:
website.com/main-category/?colour=red
website.com/main-category/?colour=blue
website.com/main-category/?colour=white

Why not just?:
website.com/shop-by-color/red/
website.com/shop-by-color/blue/
website.com/shop-by-color/white

So they've created a page for each colour, but they're not categories, it's a link to a main category with the respective filter applied.

Is there a purpose for this? Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through instead of the just the traditional category structure/paths. The only reason I can think of is they want clean category path URLs for every category so it doesn't show the parent categories. But does that actual benefit organic ranking?


I want to improve and reorganize some categories, but I don't understand what they've done here.

frankiefaithful said:

Why not just?:
website.com/shop-by-color/red/
website.com/shop-by-color/blue/
website.com/shop-by-color/white

Click to expand...

I don't know the answer to this, but I like it.

I don't understand why they've done this but I would be ok with it. Probably that some categories of your site are too small / insignificant to be turned into categories, that's my assumption. But like I said, I don't know the exact reason but I think you should keep this format for this particular segmentation...

frankiefaithful said:

Instead of:
website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/
website.com/jackets/spring-jackets/
website.com/jackets/fall-jackets/

They have it as:
website.com/winter-jackets/
website.com/spring-jackets/
website.com/fall-jackets/

Click to expand...

again, I'm not sure that what I'll say is true (and if it's not, someone please correct me), but I think that google (well, search engines not just google) read the content on a page differently to humans.

More specifically, they (the bots) read the source code, and if you check the source code of the page website.com/winter-jackets/ for example, and you see that instead of website.com/winter-jackets/ it shows up as website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/ then this is a win-win both for your users and for google because the users see the clean URL (website.com/winter-jackets/) while the bots (google) sees the SEO'd URL (website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/)

If this assumption is correct then the marketing team that's optimizing your site are doing it right, and you shouldn't be worried. But if I'm not right... well... you might want to change the URLs to your liking then

Just make sure to 301 the old URLs to the new ones, especially if the old URLs are already ranking and bringing you traffic and sales....

Also, while not 100% related to your issue, this guide might shed a bit of light on how to properly silo sites for best performance. I know that it's blogs / content sites that are exemplified in this guide, but it's still worth reading:
https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-siloing-2023-the-last-siloing-guide-youll-ever-need.1502244/

frankiefaithful said:

Then on the front end, they set up menus and navigation link to each page as Website > Jackets > Winter Jackets

Click to expand...

breadcrumbs have become important in on-page SEO lately. I never liked breadcrumbs either, but.... if we want google traffic we have to dance to how google sings, so I would keep them...

frankiefaithful said:

When clicking the red shirt category, it goes to website.com/winter-jackets/

Click to expand...

this is not normal. Maybe they've messed up the URLs, and if they didn't... well... I'm as puzzled as you are

Draw their attention to this, maybe they did (unintentionally) screw up, this is quite common when re-vamping big sites. Just let them know and see what they say...

frankiefaithful said:

Is there any advantage to this? I want to clean up and oragnize the categories, but not sure why they're doing it like this. Tranditionally I'm used to the category structure/paths just matching the way we set up the navigation.

Click to expand...

all I know is that part of the "good optimization" process of a website is the fact that most important pages of the site should be maximum 2 clicks away from the homepage. So, if the old structure of your site had URLs with 3 or more sub-pages / sub-sections / sub-categories or whatever you want to call them and all these extra sub-thingies showed up in the URL then I can understand why the marketing team have chosen to trim all URLs to 2 levels maximum

frankiefaithful said:

When clicking the red shirt category, it goes to website.com/winter-jackets/

Click to expand...

this is not normal. Maybe they've messed up the URLs, and if they didn't... well... I'm as puzzled as you are

Draw their attention to this, maybe they did (unintentionally) screw up, this is quite common when re-vamping big sites. Just let them know and see what they say...

Click to expand...

Sorry, that was my mistake. I meant to write "when clicking the Winter Jackets category, it goes to website.com/winter-jackets/
As it's not a subcategory of /jackets/

More specifically, they (the bots) read the source code, and if you check the source code of the page website.com/winter-jackets/ for example, and you see that instead of website.com/winter-jackets/ it shows up as website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/ then this is a win-win both for your users and for google because the users see the clean URL (website.com/winter-jackets/) while the bots (google) sees the SEO'd URL (website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/)

Click to expand...

It doesn't show up as website.com/jackets/winter-jackets/ in the source code or for the search engine. They're linked to on the front end, but there's no path related to the parent category.

Perhaps shorter URLs is a good idea, but thinking why there's not a more orthodox way to do it. IE, Organize them in the back end, but just remove the category path like you can do with products. Doesn't seem Magento has that as default functionality.

Still going to be search for a more definitive answer, as I would like to organize the categories the traditional way as it's kind of a mess right now.

frankiefaithful said:

Sorry, that was my mistake. I meant to write "when clicking the Winter Jackets category, it goes to website.com/winter-jackets/
As it's not a subcategory of /jackets/

Click to expand...

it's ok

And from a UX perspective it's fine, so I don't think you need to stress too much about it... Although... another question popped into my mind now, which is: is there any content on the /jackets/ category page?

Because if there's no content I can see why the marketing team chose to leave it out of the URL (although it would have still been better to create content on it and include it into the URL since it's a very important and logical piece of the silo... at least that's how I would have siloed a site about clothing)

frankiefaithful said:

Perhaps shorter URLs is a good idea

Click to expand...

it is a good idea, but it's not as important from a SEO perspective as people think. I have never seen sites being de-ranked for having ugly URLs. I think that if you get the other important on-page and on-site SEO elements right the URL ugliness is the last thing to worry about. Siloing, however, is a different thing (and it's very important as it's explained in the guide that I've linked you with earlier), and sometimes silos and URL structure coincide with each other, which is why it creates so much confusion among people (myself included quite often )

frankiefaithful said:

Organize them in the back end, but just remove the category path like you can do with products

Click to expand...

yeah, that's how I usually do it on my sites...

frankiefaithful said:

Doesn't seem Magento has that as default functionality.

Click to expand...

oh right, I forgot that you're not on Wordpress....

Well, in this case, I don't think I can be of too much help since I know nothing about Magento (although, the same SEO principles apply to all site builders)

frankiefaithful said:

Still going to be search for a more definitive answer, as I would like to organize the categories the traditional way as it's kind of a mess right now.

Click to expand...

sure! And good luck with it