Divide categories into subcategories, or use tags?

[ichthyous]

I am redesigning a 9 year old photography website and switching it to the Wordpress platform. As part of the site redesign I have made the following major changes:

1) Reduced all duplicate pages and merged them into one unique page / url per photo. The site is reducing in size from 3,500 pages to approx. 1,500 or so. I am 301 redirecting the duplicate pages from the old site to the unique page on the new site. For example, /photos/new-york/architecture/photo-title/ and /photos/architecture/photo-title/ are both being merged into /photo/photo-title/ (no more category or subcat url in the individual pages). I am concerned that reducing the number of pages on my site that drastically could have unintended consequences though, since the overall internal link count will be much lower.

2) I moved all lowest level pages up to the top. Previously, individual photo pages were buried in categories, subcategories, and sub-subcategories. Now the lowest level pages are all served from the same folder at the top (/photo/) . Individual photos can referenced from multiple categories, but always use the same URL.

3) I am keeping the urls of my most popular (highest ranking) categories the same as my current site, however with WordPress you cannot use the same category url (category slug) more than once, so some top level category urls will need to change and be redirected.

4) I am trying to make my overall site architecture shallower by possibly eliminating sub-subcategories entirely and converting them to tags.

My question has several parts:

1) Is it better to have more or fewer subcategories to classify content within major (high ranking) categories? For example, I could have 4 broad sub-categories, each with 20+ pages of content and use tags to further organize those individual photo pages. Or I can create 12 more specific subcategories with fewer pages in each one and not use tags.
2) Each category functions as a landing page on my site, so a certain amount of subcategories seems to create a "site within a site". In the past when I added more subcategories some main categories fared better...but how many subcats are too many?
3) In some cases is it better to just tag photos with a keyword and create tag pages to pare down the overall number of subcategory pages?

I have heard that tag pages in Wordpress typically don't rank well and I don't want to lose the traffic I currently am getting from the multiplicity of categories / subcats I have on my site. I would like to make the site look a little less "over-categorized" though and make it easier for people to see a wider array of images faster, rather than having to click through to so many options. I appreciate any recommendations on how best to handle this!

[goodroi]

#1 - Shrinking a site dramaticially can have unintended consequences but overall it is a smart idea if you are getting rid of low quality pages that could trigger penalties like panda. Figure out how much value you have and then slice up your site accordingly. It makes no sense to create a subcategory if it only has 3 anemic pages.

#2 - There is no limit on subcategories. If you have great content and a crazy amount of links you can be a massive website with strong rankings. Look at Amazon & WIkipedia. For most websites that isn't the case and it is better to be an expert on a niche and organically grow to other categories. You don't want a site that has low quality pages for the sake of having a large page count - that can lead to panda troubles.

#3 - Not sure I understand the question. If you have a photo gallery, you should add relevant text because Google is still basically a text retrieval search engine. If you have no text, it is harder for Google to figure out where it should rank your photo pages. You can add tags but I prefer photo descriptions. Adding tags can sometimes look a little too much like keyword spamming and IMHO often doesn't add enough relevant and useful text. Interlinking relevant pages is a good idea but don't stop there. Make sure you add real value to each page you want to perform well. Think what would be helpful to users and do it. Not because you want to make Google happy but so you make users happy and they return to your site making you less dependent on Google search rankings.

Bonus - If you want to slim down the site and boost usability - make the most of the wordpress search feature. Users love being able to search and go immediately to what they want in one click vs having to drill down and click 7 times to get to the right place.

[Rob_Banks]

My first impression is that you are shooting yourself in the foot. Moving lower level pages to the top makes sense if it facilitates site administration, but it doesn't provide benefit to the individual pages. If two pages are linked from a home page, one being /photos/page1.html, the second being /photos/plus/a/really/long/path/page1.html Both pages get the same support from the home page, the path doesn't diminish the benefit of being linked from the home page.

With a photo site, if I had bird photos(birds are cool because they can mostly fly, except for crows, mynah birds and pigeons which are skyrats IMHO), and had a bald eagle photo.
I could do photos/bald_eagle.html
or I could do birds/birds_of_prey/eagles/bald_eagle.html

Second example has two mentions of birds, two mentions of eagle, and really is very descriptive for a user looking for bald eagle info. Or birds of prey info. Or eagle info.

Structure, navigation and breadcrumbs take planning and thought, but provide benefits if done well.

[not2easy]

If moving to WordPress you may be aware that WP serves the same content multiple ways, no matter what the name is. If you create a page or post and name it ny-photos (for example) it can be accessed at its original URL such as https://www.example.com/ny-photos/ but also at https://www.example.com/photos/ny-photos/ (its category URL) and https://www.example.com/archives/2015/ny-photos/ (its archive URL) and https://www.example.com/ny-photos/tags/architecture/ny-photos/ (if "architecture" was a tag added, a tags URL) because WP offers several ways to sort and search your content. You control the URLs in the original settings you choose. It is important to know that there will be multiple URLs for each article/photo and you need to choose a single taxonomy to use as the canonical. I've used a plugin to deal with this for so long, I can't tell you if WP is including that functionality built in today or not.

[ichthyous]

Thanks for the responses to my post....

@goodroi:
#1 - I am hoping that merging low level / low ranking buried pages into one stronger page will benefit me. It's a risk in that I might lose a lot of longtail searches. Currently, I might have three pages showing the same photo but with slightly different titles and descriptions. That was done in order to combat Panda penalty and has worked thus far, but it's a very unwieldy system

#3 - I am not referring to using tags to replace text. In Wordpress you have Categories and you have Tags. I can choose to replicate what I have now to a certain extent by creating numerous categories and subcategories. For example: photos/new-york/landmarks/chrysler-building/ vs. photo-tag/chrysler building/. I am thinking that for the lowest level subcategories it might be easier to just tag the related images, which will create a page for that tag. I can then redirect to that page, instead of a subcategory page. As it stands now I have too many sub-subcats and a lot of them don't perform well anyway.

@Rob_Banks: Moving the lowest level photo pages to the top is the single biggest change to the site. Some pages rank well now, but most don't.. None of the lowest level pages are linked to from the top, nor are they linked to from the categories they belong to...how would that be possible, I would need to have thousands of links on the home page? The lowest level pages all link upward though, and horizontally to other lowest level photo pages. I am hoping that pushing them all upward to the same directory will make them more easily indexable, as now they are buried two and three levels deep.

With your example above of the birds pages, wouldn't that be considered duplicate content? I will have the same photo page referenced in multiple categories throughout the site, for example:

/photos/architecture/
/photos/new-york/architecture/
/photos/black-and-white/architecture/

All of these might include the same black and white photo of the Chrysler building, but that photo will always be served from /photo/chrysler-building-spire-bw/ for example. I realize that I might lose some of the descriptive hints that the category and subcat urls offer about the photo, but isn't linking to one photo / one url from multiple categories going to boost the page, rather than water down by having three unique urls?

@not2easy: I am using a popular SEO plugin which redirects attachment pages and I am eliminating date archives entirely. With wordpress custom post types you can choose to have date archives or not. Pages which have their own category will not be tagged with a similar term...you really have to choose whether you want tags or categories and not both for the same page. There won't be multiple instances of urls for the same page...each photo links back up to the same url no matter where it shows up on the site.

Thanks again for the replies!

[Rob_Banks]

/photos/ is redundant, I'm guessing every crawler knows a jpg is an image

/photos/architecture/
/photos/new-york/architecture/
/photos/black-and-white/architecture/

/architecture/new_york/black_and_white/ is how I'd roll. Broadest category first, then regional, then topic. Low level pages in the topic link to "black_and_white" and "new_york" and "architecture".

If you have CMS limitations, then "new_york" and "new_york_black_and_white"

[ichthyous]

Thanks Rob, but as the original post mentioned, I need to stick with the original urls from my current site. I am trying to maintin all the most important category urls and only reorganize the less important categories. Unfortunately Wordpress is rather primitive in one respect, it doesn't let you use the same category url (slug) over again... you get one and that's it. So unless I can find a workaround I will be forced to rename some of my current categories...the only workaround thus far is actually hacking the WP core.

[Planet13]

A couple of thoughts...

Firstly, I think that it is best to follow what works best for the users. I tend to think multiple levels of categories / subcategories works best.

If you find that your pictures might end up in multiple subcategories, maybe it would be helpful to have less categories and change SOME of them to tags.

Also, please remember that you DON'T need to have the category in the url when on an individual post.

Assuming you have a category with the code: widgets

So instead of:

example.com/widgets/blue-widget/

it could be just:

example.com/blue-widget

That way, if you have categories like widgets, best-selling-widgets, new-widgets, and large-widgets, you don't have to worry about having URLs like:

example.com/widgets/blue-widget/
example.com/best-selling-widgets/blue-widget/
example.com/new-widgets/blue-widget/
example.com/large-widgets/blue-widget/

However, if you want to KEEP the category code in the URLs of SOME posts, that might be more difficult.

Is it possible to remove the /category_code/ from ALL URLs and then for certain posts change the slug so that it includes the /category_code/ in the slug on a case by case basis?

[ichthyous]

@Planet13 - Yes, that is what I am thinking of doing...only converting **some** of the subcategories to tags so there is still a page on the site about that specific keyword and so I can redirect the old subcategory page to it. Anything that is more important would remain as a category or a subcategory.

Overall I want to make the site seem less highly categorized like a cheap stock photo website and allow users to discover new photos by creating somewhat broader categories, and more specific pages via the use of tags that people will find via search. In other words, I will be sacrificing some search traffic for usability. I'm just worried that those tag pages will not ever rank as well because they won't have any internal links pointing to them from anyplace other than the photo pages that use that tag.

With regards to the individual photo pages (which are basically products) they will not ever have the category name in the url...all the individual photo pages are served from a directory at the top called /photos/...so /photos/photo-title-xyz/. Whichever category the photo is referenced in throughout the site it will always use that same url.

Would it be better to actually make the page title hierarchical as well, and use canonical urls to avoid duplicate content issues? i.e. the same photo could appear over and over in multiple categories:
/photos/new-york/landmarks/photo-title-xyz/
/photos/architecture/photo-title-xyz/
/photos/locations/country/photo-title-xyz/

[Planet13]

Personally, I would avoid the category / hierarchical parts of the URL altogether. But that's just me.

As for usability, I am not sure which is going to be easiest. Personally, I tend to prefer categorization over tag clouds when I visit a site (and I find that in SOME cases, having the same post in the same category can be maddening - but that is generally only in certain circumstances).