E-Commerce Categorization

[BlinkWeb]

I'm working on an e-commerce site that currently has about 50 root categories and growing, with no sub-categories. They are all linked from the sidebar of every page and all the products are pretty related. They could probably be sub-categorized in to 5 root categories.

At want point does categorization become too flat?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Roger,

Categorization becomes too flat at the moment you lose high quality visitors.  Since the site started out flat, there's no way to tell what that point it.  The only way to determine if it's already too flat is to refine it.  I always recommend to clients that it's best to have no more than eight to ten top level categories, and only have sidebar navigation that links to sub-categories within the specific category you're in, or at most, those, then below them, two or three additional links to similar top level categories.

The reason for this method is because in the flat model, you have no way of communicating to search engines what the real relationship separation is.  This in turn dilutes the ability to drive more strength to the highest level categories. The end result then is a situation where your top level categories don't do as well for their most important keyword phrases, the sub-category page phrases also suffer, and in turn, individual product pages do as well.

[BlinkWeb]

Yeah that makes sense. Unfortunately this site is built in ProStores, which gives me no control over the URL structure. It makes me hesitant to make category changes that are going to recreate the URL structure.

ProStores is a nightmare.

[AlanBleiweiss]

Making such radical changes is always something that shouldn't be taken lightly, that's for sure.  And if it's done, you'll need to have a spreadsheet where you can enter a column with all the page names, a column with their current URLs, and one with the new URLs, because implementing 301 Redirects is critical but can be a nightmare otherwise.

What it comes down to is evaluating the value of other SEO (on-site, link-building, and social) that can be done to improve things as compared with architectural changes.  Judgment calls.  Not always fun.