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How Much Content Should I Add On A Category Page?
The debate regarding exactly how much content should be featured on any given category page has raged for years. It is a subject that has been discussed countless times at a comparatively high level, but Google is (understandably) reluctant to pin the whole thing down to an exact figure.
After all, they’re not exactly in the habit of saying you need exactly X or Y a number of words or pages, in order to curry their favour.
Still, John Mueller himself has once again gone on record to state that overdoing it with excessive category page content is not a good idea.
He said that irrespective of whether it is a general website category page or an eCommerce product category page, the same rule applies.
While a "little bit of content I think is always useful", he stated quite clearly that "it's not the case that you need to turn it into, kind of, an article about that kind of content."
His comments came in a recent video discussion, during which the subject of category page content vs. quality was once again raised. Presumably aimed at the many millions of website owners who go nuts with their category pages, Mr Mueller made it clear that less is more.
Presumably given how the crux of the information most people are looking for will be featured on the actual product pages (or equivalent sub-pages), as opposed to broader category pages.
Less is More, Irrespective of Placement
Attempting to settle the debate once and for all, here’s what Mr Mueller had to say about the whole category page content issue:
“A little bit of content I think is always useful but it's not the case that you need to turn it into, kind of, an article about that kind of content. So a little bit of content is useful in the sense that we have a little bit more context of the articles that you're listening there. So that always makes a little bit of sense. “
“And that's something that we saw as being problematic in the early days of mobile first indexing for example. Where on desktop you would have some context about kind of the type of products that you have in a category page and on mobile you often just have a list of products. In the early days of mobile first indexing that was a bit of an issue, but I think that has settled down.”
“What I would try to avoid is making it so that you have like a Wikipedia article on the bottom of your pages. And really kind of, it's something where you can provide a little bit of context, but you don't need to rank for every keyword in the galaxy. “
He was then asked whether it made any difference if the content in question was placed at the top or the bottom of a category page:
“With these kind of category pages because it I think it just dilutes the overall view of those pages. Because we try to find them on the one hand for people looking for that category of products but also to find links to the individual products. So it's kind of a little bit is good but overdoing it doesn't really make sense.”
“I don't think there would be a big difference, my hunch would be that probably having the context at the top makes it a little bit easier for us to pick up and also things like understanding the headings and things like that with regards to a page probably makes it a little bit easier but I don't know if there would be a measurable difference.”