What's the difference between a category page and a content page
-
Hello,
Little confused on this matter.
From a website architectural and content stand point, what is the difference between a category page and a content page?
So lets say I was going to build a website around tea.
My home page would be about tea.
My category pages would be:
White Tea, Black Tea, Oolong Team and British Tea correct? ( I Would write content for each of these topics on their respective category pages correct?)
Then suppose I wrote articles on organic white tea, white tea recipes, how to brew white team etc...( Are these content pages?)
Do I think link FROM my category page ( White Tea) to my ( Content pages ie; Organic White Tea, white tea receipes etc) or do I link from my content page to my category page?
I hope this makes sense.
Thanks,
Bill
-
Ryan,
You added some great additional insight here for Bill to consider. Excellent work on that.
And yes, I agree with you in not being happy that the "edit" link doesn't want to work lately here.
-
and let me say how much I dislike how the Edit button is presently broken. Grrrrrrr
-
I like Alan's answer. A couple direct answers to questions you raised:
From a website architecture stand point, there is no difference between a category page and a content page. They are both web pages and it's up to you, as the site owner, to determine how they can be utilized to best present your product.
From a content stand point, there is no right or wrong answer, but there are best practices. On the one end, some site owners use category pages purely as an organizational tool. Let's say you find a site about "beverages". There could be a categories for Coffee, Tea and Juice. There are three ways you can use the Tea page:
1. Content Separator. The Tea category would only be viewable from a main index page which allows visitors to see how your content is organized. The category page would not be reachable per se. "Tea" would be text, not a hyperlink. I think this usage is a missed opportunity from a web design perspective.
2. Content Index. The Tea category would be used to provide links to all the Tea pages. Some websites would choose to simply add links to their various tea pages. Other sites choose to offer high level information about each tea, along with the link. The latter choice works pretty well.
3. Content. You can use your category page to provide content. When I look up [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea]Wikipedia's Tea page[/url] there is a lot of information which can all be included on your Tea page.
It really depends on the balance you wish to achieve for your site. What is the focus? Is "Tea" something you want to sell or educate your visitors about? Or is "Tea" a road marker used to guide readers to the real destination.
You asked "Do I link FROM my category page to my content pages or do I link from my content page to my category page".
My answer would be, both. Let's say "Bill's Black Tea" was one of your products. On your Black Tea category page, you would use anchor text to link to Bill's Black Tea. You might say "If you want a smooth tasting tea, try Bill's Black Tea". Your anchor text would be "Bill's Black Tea" which would link to that page.
From the Bill's Black Tea page, you may make a general statement such as "Connoisseurs of black tea will appreciate the smooth taste of Bill's Black Tea" with "black tea" being anchor text back to the category page.
You asked a great question. The answer requires some high level thinking on your part. Do you want your site to be an educational resource for visitors, and your site happens to also sell tea? Or are you a tea merchant who offers high level information about the products you offer?
There is not a right or wrong answer. It's market positioning.
-
It's easy to get confused with terminology. All pages, however, should have high quality, unique, paragraph based content, no matter what you call them.
You have the right idea for organization.
From the home page, there should be links to the top level categories
White Tea
Black Tea
Oolong Tea
British Tea
Then all of your articles having anything to do with White Tea would be linked from within the White Tea section of the site.
So the tree would then look like:
- White Tea
- Organic White Tea
- White Tea Recipes
- How to Brew White Tea
- Black Tea
- Oolong Tea
- British Tea
This is, in fact, high quality content organization. So congratulations for having understood the concept.
- White Tea
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
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
Category URL Pagination where URLs don't change between pages
Hello, I am working on an e-commerce site where there are categories with multiple pages. In order to avoid pagination issues I was thinking of using rel=next and rel=prev and cannonical tags. I noticed a site where the URL doesn't change between pages, so whether you're on page 1,2, or 3 of the same category, the URL doesn't change. Would this be a cleaner way of dealing with pagination?
Technical SEO | | whiteonlySEO0 -
Huge number of indexed pages with no content
Hi, We have accidentally had Google indexed lots os our pages with no useful content at all on them. The site in question is a directory site, where we have tags and we have cities. Some cities have suppliers for almost all the tags, but there are lots of cities, where we have suppliers for only a handful of tags. The problem occured, when we created a page for each cities, where we list the tags as links. Unfortunately, our programmer listed all the tags, so not only the ones, where we have businesses, offering their services, but all of them! We have 3,142 cities and 542 tags. I guess, that you can imagine the problem this caused! Now I know, that Google might simply ignore these empty pages and not crawl them again, but when I check a city (city site:domain) with only 40 providers, I still have 1,050 pages indexed. (Yes, we have some issues between the 550 and the 1050 as well, but first things first:)) These pages might not be crawled again, but will be clicked, and bounces and the whole user experience in itself will be terrible. My idea is, that I might use meta noindex for all of these empty pages and perhaps also have a 301 redirect from all the empty category pages, directly to the main page of the given city. Can this work the way I imagine? Any better solution to cut this really bad nightmare short? Thank you in advance. Andras
Technical SEO | | Dilbak0 -
Should I worry about these 404's?
Just wondering what the thought was on this. We have a site that lets people generate user profiles and once they delete the profile the page then 404's. I was told there is nothing we can do about those from our developers, but I was wondering if I should worry about these...I don't think they will affect any of our rankings, but you never know so I thought I would ask. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KateGMaker1 -
Blank pages in Google's webcache
Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Technical SEO | | A_Q
Elias0 -
Different TLD's same content - duplicate content? - And a problem in foreign googles?
Hi, Operating from the Netherlands with customers troughout Europe we have for some countries the same content. In the netherlands and Belgium Dutch is spoken and in Germany and Switserland German is spoken. For these countries the same content is provided. Does Google see this as duplicate content? Could it be possible that a german customer gets the Swiss website as a search result when googling in the German Google? Thank you for your assistance! kind regards, Dennis Overbeek [email protected]
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0 -
Should I Block Tag, Category, Author Pages
Just finished reviewing the first crawl of my first SEOmoz campaign for a site that I am working on. The site I"m working on uses Wordpress as a CMS, and most if not all of the warnings and notices have to do with author, category, and tag pages. Should I block these from being indexed? Why or why not?
Technical SEO | | Falconberg0 -
Why are my pages getting duplicate content errors?
Studying the Duplicate Page Content report reveals that all (or many) of my pages are getting flagged as having duplicate content because the crawler thinks there are two versions of the same page: http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/audio.aspx http://www.mapsalive.com/Features/Audio.aspx The only difference is the capitalization. We don't have two versions of the page so I don't understand what I'm missing or how to correct this. Anyone have any thoughts for what to look for?
Technical SEO | | jkenyon0