: WordPress subcategories and SEO I have questions about categories. Is it okay to have child (nested categories)? For example: Software Development -- Web ---- Java Script ---- PHP ---- HTML 5 --

@Gretchen104

Obviously you can always have nested categories in WordPress (and most other CMSs) as well as child pages, child posts, grandchildren, etc.

If done in a non-spammy fashion, there is no real advantage or disadvantage from the pure SEO perspective...the spiders don't particularly care so long as the links work and the content is indexable. The big worry is creating a spammy-looking site that appears to abuse common keywords. As a rule of thumb I never go lower than grandchildren:

Software Development
-- Mobile Development
---- Android development <---- no lower.


and try to avoid repeating the same terms in categories (e.g. "development" above). So a good replacement for the above could be:

Development
-- Mobile
---- Android
---- iOS


That should handle most spam concerns.

The other reason to avoid long, nested categories is simple UX. I can remember and type yoursite.com/development/mobile/android/pretty easily but yoursite.com/software-development/mobile-development/android-development/makes me tired just looking at it. So always keep humans in mind when creating nice permalinks and the SEO benefit should follow automatically.

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