Having too Many Categories and Products

Is it affecting our rankings?

[F_Rose]

Our site has a large variety of categories and products.

The categories are so vast, that we could actually build a site for each category and still make great profits per category. (if we are ranked well).

We are not doing very well in ranking, my question, does the fact that we have too many categories affect us from getting ranked. Is one category sort of hurting the other to get ranked.

Would we be better off if we would have a seperate site for each category?

[tedster]

Tough questions. Certainly many sites have many categories and do very well. But if you have these suspicions, then maybe something about your site's structure is problematic. We don't do specific site reviews here, and you may well need to hire an outside expert to look at the situation with fresh and unbiased eyes.

Google has become a very complex beast, and looking for simple answers can sometimes be as big a problem as not looking at all. One thing you may want to do is notice how many inbound links you have that only go the the Home Page, compared to deeper links. Nothing helps a larger site the way nice, deep links can. So if you've got some good stuff down there, let others know about it.

[MichaelEng]

I run a website with 8000 categories and it performs very well.

Like Tester says, it's all about how you structure the website and the linking. The problem with categories is that if you have a 3 level structure, the pages on the 3rd level will not be ranked that well, so you need to find a way to structure the website so you can get good links to the pages

[Oliver Henniges]

Apart from a detailed analysis of the site's link structure it sometimes helps to add some unique quality-content to the main category-pages. This is a lot of work, and requires your categories are well-structured and not only /234/23.html-like. I think in most cases this helps to make the thick end of the long-tail a bit thicker.