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Category page

A category page is a page of an online store that lists the products of one category, such as all wine glasses, and links to each of them.

How it works

A category page sits between the home page and the product pages. It answers broad searches such as “wine glasses”, made before the shopper has picked a model. It usually has filters (faceted navigation) and several pages of products (pagination).

Google works out a site’s structure from the links between its pages, not from its URLs. Google’s ecommerce guidance suggests linking menus to categories, categories to sub-categories and sub-categories to every product, with ordinary <a href> links. If a category page does not link to all its products, Googlebot may not find them all by crawling. What else belongs on the page: category page SEO.

A product ad leads to the product page given in the feed. A category page becomes a landing page for text ads, for example when final URL expansion in Performance Max swaps your final URL for a page that fits the search better.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop’s “Wine glasses” category holds 120 products, 24 to a page, so it has five pages: /wine-glasses, then /wine-glasses?page=2 to ?page=5. Each page links to the next one and points its canonical tag at itself. A search for “wine glasses” fits the category page; “crystal wine glass 450 ml” fits a product page.

Not to be confused with

  • Product category — a value from Google’s taxonomy in the feed. The category page is a page of your site; the names need not match.
  • Product type — the store’s own category path in the feed. It can repeat the site’s category tree, but ads read the attribute, while shoppers and Googlebot see the page.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “Pages 2 to 5 should point their canonical tag at page 1.” Right: Google treats each page as a separate one and advises giving each its own canonical URL instead of page 1’s.
  • Wrong: “rel="next" and rel="prev" tell Google the pages belong together.” Right: Google no longer uses these tags; it follows the <a href> links between the pages.

Sources