Automating product categorisation for better efficiency, speed & SEO

If you manage a large product catalogue with hundreds or thousands of items, many products will likely appear in multiple categories or sub-categories, particularly if your navigation includes some user-friendly options.

Let’s take a retailer of chocolates for example. They might sell hundreds of different chocolate products across their website and have structured the navigation with several different categories. This means that a product that appears under the category chocolate type (i.e. dark chocolate), might also appear under product type (i.e. chocolate buttons or chocolate bars), event (i.e. Birthday, Easter, Mother’s Day chocolates), price (i.e. Less than £10), or any other categories/sub-categories the merchant has created.

This improves the user experience and hopefully also improves conversion, but it can potentially cause some issues for the retailer. Namely, assigning products to all the different categories correctly & efficiently, and avoiding creating numerous URL permutations (based on all the different categories) that all go to the same product page. Let’s explore further.

Category Assignment

First thing to consider is category assignment. Manually managing product categorisation can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially for retailers with large catalogues and complex navigation. With products often needing to appear in multiple categories, assigning them individually can become an ongoing and onerous task. Each time new products are added, this process must be repeated, increasing the risk of inconsistencies and mistakes.

Instead of manual categorisation, our automated system ensures products are assigned to the correct categories and subcategories upon upload, streamlining merchandising. Take our chocolate example above, by using existing product attributes—such as chocolate type, product type, price, and dietary information—our system intelligently places each item in the right category, reducing errors and saving time.

So instead of adding categories to every single product, once they are set up, every new product uploaded is automatically assigned to the right ones. Additionally, any newly created categories or subcategories will pull from existing attributes, ensuring they are instantly and accurately populated with relevant products.

URL Structure

The second key consideration is URL structure. In the example of the chocolate retailer with hundreds of products across 50 categories, product listing pages— including search results—generate numerous links. These include links for filtering, sorting, pagination, and adjusting the number of items displayed per page.

If a search engine were to crawl every possible variation of these links, it could result in around 20,000 permutations! However, this provides little value, as it simply displays the same page in slightly different ways. This not only wastes computing resources but can also cause duplicate indexing issues, with the same URL, title, and H1 being recorded multiple times.

For instance, a merchant with 50 categories could generate up to 2.5 million unnecessary page views from a single robot. By controlling and suppressing this excess crawl traffic, merchants can significantly reduce wasted resources and hosting costs. This not only improves site performance but also ensures a faster, more efficient experience for genuine customers.

In order to avoid this we include a canonical tag which doesn't include the query string parameters so no matter which category the user finds to visit the page, the URL that is output is the same. There is also the option to assign the product to a primary category for SEO purposes. Some merchants even assign all product to a home category so that every product is output with a short URL.

In Summary

Automatically assigning products to categories enhances efficiency, site speed, and SEO performance by reducing manual effort, ensuring accurate categorisation, and minimising duplicate pages. This automation improves navigation, prevents indexing of unnecessary URLs, and optimises search engine rankings for better visibility and user experience.