During a John Mueller hangout, one SEO professional asked him about making their e-shop category pages more informative.
The situation is they run an e-commerce website. And they are now in a stage where they want to make major updates to their category pages, and one draft.
In one draft, they want to get rid of the product listings. So they would have the product listings with a faceted search, where you can filter for the products you are looking for. His question is this:
When they remove the whole product listing of category pages, would they have a disadvantage in the rankings? Because first, all the competitors have these kinds of product listings.
And second, their guess is that these are such an established element for e-commerce pages that users expect something along these lines – an overview of all these products and filters, such as to search for the products they want.
John said that he doesn’t see any problems there, from an SEO point of view. He thinks there are different things you would want to watch out for, so that Google can still find all of the individual products that they have cleaned the links there.
But, if you’re just kind of redesigning this kind of a category page and making it look more like an informational page, John would not expect any problems with that.
He also doesn’t believe that Google would do anything special with these kinds of category pages in search anyway.
From this perspective, you’re just changing the design, essentially. He believes this would be different if it were a product page, and you were to change it completely. Because they do try to recognize product pages and figure out “Oh, where’s the price? Where is the availability?” These kinds of things.
If you make it look entirely different, John believes that this would impact how Google picks up the product pages.
And whether they can show it in product search results or not.
This happens at approximately the 21:47 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
SEO Professional 5 21:47
Yes. So we run an e-commerce website. And we are now in a stage where we want to make major updates to our category pages, and one draft. Once or like in one draft, we want to get rid of the product listings. So you have the product listings with a faceted search, where you can filter for the project for the products you are looking for.
And my question is this. So when we remove the whole product listing of category pages, would we have a disadvantage in the rankings? Because like, first, all the other competitors, like like, have these kinds of product listings.
And second, these, like my guess is, this is such an established element for e-commerce pages that users- they expect something like this to have some kind of overview of all the products and filters, like to search for the products they want.
John 23:02
I wouldn’t see any problems there from an SEO point of view. I think there are different things you would want to watch out for which probably you will, so that we can still find all of the individual products, that we have clean links there.
But if you’re just kind of redesigning this kind of a category page and making it look more like an informational page, I wouldn’t expect any problems with that. I also don’t think we do anything special with those kinds of category pages in search anyway.
So from that point of view, you’re just changing the design, essentially. I think it would be different if it were a product page, and you were to change it completely. Because we do try to recognize product pages and figure out oh, where’s the price?
Where’s the availability, those kinds of things. And if you made it look completely differently, I don’t know how, but if it were, then I could imagine that affects how we pick up the product pages. And if we can show it in product search results or not. But the category pages, as far as I know, we don’t do anything special with them. So if you hide them, essentially, and make sure that we can still find the links to their products.
That’s kind of an extreme case, you could do that. But if you want to make them more useful by providing more information on them, I think that’s a good idea.
