How faceted navigation works and why it is dangerous
Catalog filters are a convenience for shoppers and a potential disaster for indexing. Every combination of parameters can create a new URL, and there can be thousands of such URLs.
Expert blog by LightSEO
How to restructure a catalog without losing rankings
Changing the structure of a live store is the riskiest operation in SEO. It can be done without losses, provided you act in the right order.
How to organize a catalog with thousands of SKUs
Once you have several thousand items, the usual techniques stop working: the menu cannot fit every section, filters become cumbersome, and search returns the wrong results. You need a different appro…
How to name categories so people find them
A category name is both navigation for the shopper and the main signal for the search engine. Creativity works against you here.
Catalog structure for a B2B store
A B2B buyer searches differently from a retail one: they come with a specific technical requirement, know the SKUs and compare products rationally, using the specification table.
Product sorting: what to set as the default
Everyone sees the first nine products in a category, and almost nobody sees the last ones. The way your catalog is sorted by default directly affects what you sell.
How many products a category should have
Too few, and the category looks empty and ranks poorly. Too many, and the shopper can't choose. The optimum depends on the niche, but the limits are roughly the same for everyone.
How many nesting levels a catalog should have
The question seems technical, yet it is about money: every extra level means one more click to the product and further dilution of page weight.
What to do with products that fit into two categories
A classic situation: does a kids' winter snowsuit belong in "Outerwear" or in "Winter collection"? The answer depends on how your catalog is built technically.
Empty categories: how they hurt your store
The category was created "for the future", and the products never appeared. It seems to just sit there without bothering anyone. In fact, it bothers both the shopper and the search engine.
Catalog pagination: how to avoid losing indexing
Products from the second and later pages of a category often never get indexed at all. The search crawler doesn't reach them, let alone a shopper coming from search.
Why an online store needs tags and how they differ from categories
Tags are a way to group products from different categories by a shared attribute without breaking the catalog structure. Done right, they bring traffic for queries that your structure does not cover.