Google's John Mueller was once again asked about how much content should you put on your category pages, be it e-commerce categories pages or other category pages. In short, John said a "little bit of content I think is always useful" but don't overdo it with too much content.
John said "it's not the case that you need to turn it into, kind of, an article about that kind of content." He said sometimes adding too much content will "dilute" the value of those category pages. John said "avoid making it so that you have like a Wikipedia article on the bottom of your pages." "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," he added. John said "it just dilutes 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."
He later addressed content on the top of the category page versus the top, saying "I don't think there would be a big difference."
Here is the video embed where he said this at the 14:57 mark:
Here is the transcript:
Category pages. Content at the top or the bottom of the page, especially where you've got say quite a lot of products. Having cuts at the top or the bottom page will it make a difference to ranking?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 the articles that you're listening there. So that always makes 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. In the early days of mobile first indexing that was a bit of an issue but I think that has settled down.
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 kind of category pages because it I think it just dilutes 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.
Then asks about putting this content on the top or the bottom of the category page.
I don't think there would be a big difference, 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 a page probably makes it a little bit easier but I don't know if there would be a measurable difference.
This is a topic we covered numerous times here with Are You Writing Too Much Content On Your E-Commerce Category Pages For Google? and Google: Don't Stuff Content At The Bottom Of Your E-Commerce Category Pages.
Also, Glenn Gabe did an excellent case study on this topic, read about it over here.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
