Auditing the pages nobody reads: category and section pages
Section pages hold a site together, and they are rarely reviewed. We audited 300 of them: 4,575 findings, 255 rewritten, 81 cut to half their length.
Articles get the attention: they are new, they are measured, they get shared. The pages that hold them together, category and section pages, are written once and forgotten. Yet they are often what search engines see first, and what links everything else together.
Audited
300
Section pages reviewed, one by one
Findings
4,575
Issues logged across those pages
Rewritten
255
81 of them cut to half their length
What a section audit looks for
- Outdated facts. Numbers, names and claims that were true when the page was written.
- Missing or broken paths. Sections that did not link to their best articles, or linked to ones that no longer exist.
- Duplication. Sections so similar that they competed with each other. Earlier, about 1,025 near-identical list pages had already been cut to 40.
- Padding. Text written to reach a word count, saying nothing a visitor needs.
- A clear job. Each section page should answer one question: what is here, and where should I go next?
Shorter, on purpose
81 pages were cut to half their length. Long is not the same as useful. A section page that gets visitors to the right article in one scroll does its job better than one that buries the links under five paragraphs.
What comes next
The rewritten pages are now measured like everything else, and their effect on search will be reported the same way: labelled proven, likely or unknown.
The examples in this article come from real engagements. Client details withheld; every figure comes from the client’s own data.
Read the case study →