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Currently, I'm setting up my website and I'm wondering if it would make sense to directly set up subcategories (i.e. Real Estate Investments, Stock market investments, Crypto Investments) or go with the main category 'Investments' for now as I don't have many posts and later categorize further by creating subcategories.

What makes more sense for a new website? Can I easily add new subcategories later without impacting my ranking? If I move an existing article to a newly created subcategory, will that cause problems?

Note: my URL structure does not contain categories, so no issues there.

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  • Made a slight edit to include some info from the comments for clarity.
    – Mike Ciffone
    Oct 13, 2021 at 22:36

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I'm assuming you are using a content management system (CMS) like WordPress where every article can be assigned to multiple categories. The CMS then creates a page for each category that lists the articles in that category.

You should create categories as they are needed.

You shouldn't create categories before they each have 3 or 4 articles in them. Categories that contain only a link to one or two articles are not very useful. Search engines consider such category pages to be "thin content". Categories with few articles can hurt the user experience and SEO of your website.

Adding new categories later doesn't hurt your SEO. Your articles and existing categories retain their URLs and SEO. New category pages get added and search engines see them as new content.

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  • Thanks for your answer. Just to clarify, I'm aware that adding new category pages does not hurt SEO. What I meant is whether moving certain blog posts from a particular category into a newly created subcategory hurts SEO. Imagine the main category Investments. Because I do not have that many articles on this topic yet, I have all my articles in this category. But as I have more and more articles, I'd like to create subcategories, like Real Estate Investments. Would moving some of my articles from Investments to into the newly created Real Estate Investments category hurt my SEO?
    – crosby
    May 16, 2021 at 18:18
  • It could hurt the SEO of your investments category. Depends on how your CMS treats post and subcategories. If they're still all listed in the parent category it's really not going to change SEO much at all.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    May 16, 2021 at 18:33
  • All posts in a particular subcategory automatically appear in the main category as well - I take from your answer that in this case there would be no impact, right? On another note, would you mind elaborating why would impact SEO should this not be the case (just for my understanding)? Many thanks.
    – crosby
    May 16, 2021 at 18:39
  • If posts show up in the parent category then when you add a subcategory it really isn't changing anything on any existing pages. It's just adding new pages for the subcategories.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    May 16, 2021 at 19:16

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