In this guide you'll learn why website categories are the foundation of SEO success and how to optimize website categories. You've optimized your homepage, products, and articles -- but still haven't hit your SEO KPIs. Why does this happen? Your website taxonomy may be holding you back.
What are website classifications?
Every website has a structure that acts as scaffolding to support your individual content pages. This is a quality issue. Is the system rigorous and streamlined? Or is it an unmanaged and disorganized page? A website taxonomy is the way a website categorizes its content. This allows content to be organized into groups with similar characteristics. This helps audiences find content and helps Googlebot index it. The three most common website taxonomies are:
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Categories: These tend to be hierarchical and general in nature.
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Labels: These tend to be of a single value, non-hierarchical and specific in nature.
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Filters or Properties: These tend to be multi-valued, non-hierarchical and specific.
When you create a new category, label or facet, you are creating a term in your taxonomy. Typically, each new term automatically generates a new page based on the URL structure. This is where the SEO problems start.
Focus on topics, not keywords
Remember the SEO dark ages of keyword targeting - the main advice at the time was to create a page for each variation; singular, plural, words in different orders, etc. Those days are over. In its place is a topical focus renaissance where we as SEOs need to think bigger than keyword variations and focus on satisfying the user intent behind the query. However, many website taxonomies unknowingly return to the dark days of one keyword per page. Sometimes it's due to lack of understanding. Sometimes it's because the content is too old. Usually because of poorly maintained taxonomies.
The reality is that people love to post new content, but they are afraid to delete pages. This has resulted in a lot of outdated, poorly organized, and potentially cannibalistic content being cluttered with navigation designed for now. This is a huge problem for SEO. URLs are not ranked on their own merits alone. Every page a search engine indexes affects how quality algorithms evaluate a domain's reputation. Google's John Mueller said:
“Our quality algorithms do look at the whole site, so they look at all the content that gets indexed. If we see that most of the content that gets indexed is actually lower quality content, then we might say okay, maybe this The overall quality of the site is a bit low."
All these category pages lurking deep within your site are causing index bloat, where too many low-value pages have made it to the index and dragging down your ability to rank all the pages on your site.
How to optimize website classification?
1. SEO Category Pages
If you call yourself technical SEO, you've probably invested countless hours in category tree (re)design. You've delved into keyword research, competitor analysis, current user behavior (navigation patterns, page entries, time on page, conversion rates, search behavior, etc.), brand positioning, and content coverage to see if you can not only match but also Satisfy the user's intent. Seemingly endless discussions and workshops ensued with stakeholders to gain buy-in, and an agreement was reached after numerous compromises. Then, finally, it’s time for the nerve-racking launch that promises to lead to an uptick in organic search sessions.
But site classification is more than just category tree design. On an enterprise site, you might have 50 to 300 categories and subcategories, but other taxonomies such as tags or facet combinations automatically generate tens of thousands of pages. So when Googlebot comes to view your site, categories are only a small part of the whole. It's not enough to optimize just a small part of your website, even if they are the most searched pages. Index bloat affects your site authority. What's more, there's a good chance some of your curated category pages lurk an invisible tab page competing for the same theme. For example, if a restaurant website might have both a category and tag page for "pizza". This negatively impacts the user experience because it makes it harder to find what users are looking for. It also weakens the topical authority of the site, thereby reducing the ability to rank any page.
2. SEO Tabs
Get a database export of every tag on your website. You may be shocked not only by the numbers, but also by the terminology used. Over-labeling is a crime. The worst offenders are on sites where content creators can assign free-form tags to each post. These tags are designed to speak to entities in the story — such as a person, an event, a location, or broader themes.
I've seen many tags with only one article assigned. Not because the topic isn't discussed multiple times, but because people who manually tag pages don't all think in the same word. So you can get various keyword variations tabbed pages. For example, for a topic (for example, RuPaul's Drag Race), there can be multiple free-form tags:
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RuPaul's Drag Race
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RPDR
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Ru-Pauls Drag Race
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DragRace UK
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Rue Paul
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All-Star
Each creates an indexable tab page. Typically, there are no agreed-upon limits for websites. There is no naming convention. There is no way. Only crazy. By creating so many redundant tabbed pages, link equity value is spread across multiple pages, and the site is bloated with similar but thin content pages, sending mixed signals to Google. Use autocomplete to suggest existing tags as content creators start typing. See the entire list of tags. Keep tags that are valuable to users. 301 redirect or use 410 to remove those bad tags. Restrictions on label creation are then enforced through business processes or technical approaches.
3. SEO Multifaceted Navigation
Enterprise-level e-commerce or classifieds sites are the worst offenders when it comes to bloated, multi-faceted navigation. Historical free-form entries have always been a problem for many sites, similar to tab pages. So you end up with a color filter with blue, petrol and turquoise. This creates thin content issues for the less common colors - and annoys users because there are only three items in petrol, one is actually dark blue and the other is turquoise.
For other sites, the problem is balancing users' needs to filter exactly what they're looking for with high-quality and unique indexable pages. For example, you can filter by every neighborhood in the city, but only three have substance. Many websites handle their faceted navigation with dynamic parameters and mistakenly assume that this action alone will handle all SEO. However, depending on how it's implemented, it can have a wide-ranging impact on your SEO.
What's more, the sheer number of aspects will inevitably lead to pages with too little content to justify their existence. They are not useful to users and do not send a strong topical authority signal to search engines. Integrate facet values that never provide value to the user or Google, add a 301 redirect if the facet is indexed. Review all existing and potential aspects (critical and their value), taking into account SEO potential and audience usage metrics. Based on this list, make data-backed decisions about static versus dynamic URLs, and how to handle parameters. Finally, decide who in the organization owns the ongoing maintenance of the list.
The secret to designing website categories?
It's never done and it's never perfect because the content keeps changing:
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Categories become obsolete.
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Added new types of products.
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Market conditions change.
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Brand positioning changes.
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New user data highlights previously unseen opportunities.
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There needs to be a plan for how to optimize your site classification on a regular basis.
This usually involves a controlled vocabulary, an authoritative, restricted list of terms used to categorize content to support findability. This requires categorization management, where existing and future content is designed to follow categorization, with clear indications of when terms are added, edited or removed, and by whom to reflect the changing needs of users. The best plans rarely work in the long run. People leave. decision transfer. All these documents may be forgotten.
Website Classification Tool
Rather than having website categorization as something that is regularly reviewed, get familiar with the API (or hire a developer) and build yourself a website categorization tool that gives you all the data you need to make the right categorization decisions on an ongoing basis . See what your current taxonomy actually looks like by adding terms and mapping them to taxonomy types, URLs, and related keywords. Then, for each semester, you can start balancing the topic demand with the content supply.
Understand on-site demand with pageview and site search data from the Google Analytics Reporting API, and off-site demand by connecting to the Google Search Console API for impressions, CTR, and ranking. For broader market needs, you can pull data from the Google Ads API or the unofficial Google Trends API.
Gain insight into the quantity and quality of offers in the database by extracting the number of content pieces assigned to that taxonomy term, freshness based on the average age of recent content pieces, or bounce rate from the Google Analytics Reporting API.
Remember, the best website taxonomies will not perform well if not applied correctly so that the right content gets the right tags.
Why use live tools instead of regular reviews and formal documents?
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You can expand your site classification to respond to your site's end users, followed by the marketplace.
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Decisions based on data, not personal opinion.
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Drive a deeper understanding of topic and intent to help you deliver what users really want, not content based on keyword face value.
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