A category page in e-commerce is a page that groups related products under one URL and leads visitors to the product detail pages. Blogs and CMS platforms also use categories; this entry covers online shops.
What does a category page contain?
Baymard describes intermediary category pages, which show subcategories instead of products, and hybrid pages, which put subcategory tiles above the product grid. Which design fits depends on how many products and subcategories a shop has.
A listing with many products is split into several pages. Google’s pagination guidance says:
- Each page of the list gets its own URL, for example with
?page=2. - Each page has its own canonical URL instead of pointing to page 1.
- Google ignores fragment identifiers, so page numbers should not be set with
#. - The next page is offered with a normal
<a href>link. Google no longer usesrel="next"andrel="prev". - For “load more” or infinite scroll, the following content needs another crawlable path.
Example
HTML
<!-- https://www.example.com/running-shoes/?page=2 -->
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/running-shoes/?page=2">
<a href="https://www.example.com/running-shoes/?page=3">Next</a>
Sources
- Pagination and incremental page loading – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
- Consider providing intermediary category pages – Baymard Institute (secondary)baymard.com
- Managing crawling of faceted navigation URLs – Google Search Centraldevelopers.google.com
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