Sure, category pages can help funnel people deeper into topics they wish to read about, but do we still need them?
For informational sites with fewer than 1000 pages....
- Few visitors land on your average category page if a more relevant page exists
- Few visitors click on the category pages after arriving from search
- If articles are properly interlinked, think Wikipedia, there can be no orphan pages
- You can still funnel people to important pages by creating more content related to it, and linking to it.
- You can hand select a diverse range of most important topic aspect hub pages and link them from the index only(think topic diving board)
- Properly interlinked within the content means the related links section can go too
As a webmaster I really don't like category pages anymore. Not every article truly fits into one, search sometimes thinks they are more important than they are and, IMO, they are an extra step between pages. If there is more stuff in a Category a user may want to see, and it's related, my job is to make sure the article they are reading links directly to those pages anyway.
One more consideration from a webmaster perspective. When you create content and just toss it into a category you're being lazy. It's much harder to start by evaluating a page, deciding that "this page really should link to a page about this topic aspect from this paragraph"... and creating that page. Every page you write would both help make another page more complete and would keep the site architecture tightly related.
Getting rid of categories might help curb the use of "keyword data" as the deciding force behind choosing what to write next. Sure, that topic gets this many searches and is relatively easy to rank for.... but this page needs a different article to link to next.
I know I'm overthinking it but I want your thoughts.
