In the John Mueller hangout on 09/03/2021, one webmaster asked about category pages. They asked whether having content at the top or bottom of the page would help.
John explained that he believes a little bit of content is always going to be helpful for Google. You don’t have to turn it into an article, you just want to have a little bit of content that gives Google information about the context of the articles that appear on that page.
He also said you don’t want to have a long article at the bottom of the category page because that’s not really going to help Google learn more about the context of your articles.
But you also don’t need to rank for every single keyword for these category pages. So it doesn’t need to be a massive amount of content. This would, in actuality, dilute the quality of these pages overall.
Don’t overdo it.
This conversation occurs at approximately the 14:54 mark in the video:
John Mueller 09/03/2021 Hangout Transcript:
I, just a couple of quick questions, actually. First, one category pages content at the top or bottom of the page, especially, when you’ve got, say, quite a lot of products. Having content at the top or the bottom page, will it make a difference to ranking?
John 15:13
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 listing there. So that always makes it 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. And in the early days of mobile-first indexing, that was a bit of an issue. But I think that has settled down.
What, 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 with these kinds of category pages, because I think it just dilutes your—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.
Webmaster 7 16:38
Because we’ve got different, you know, different examples where we’ll have like a little bit of content at the top of the page and the rest of the bottom or it’s an a read more functionality. And—and generally in the past that we’ve seen rankings drop then for okay, well, maybe if we put the content at the top of the page, because they associated the relevance more now and they say going top to bottom. So will it not make a difference, then? I mean, because the point you’re saying in terms of conversion rate, you know, it’s obviously you don’t want the content to be putting other products down. But I think in terms of relevance, would you associate more relevance if the content is at the top or the bottom? Do you think or…
John 17:14
Top or bottom…I…
Webmaster 7 17:16
Without all these random, I would say random products, but there’s loads of different products. So you could have loads of different h1s and all that being pulled.
John 17:26
I don’t think there would be a big difference. My, 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 your page probably makes it a little bit easier. But I don’t know if there would be a measurable difference.
