A very good article on the topic: Optimizing Content in Category Pages while Keeping its Commercial Nature.
A quote from John Mueller: āAnother thing to consider is the purpose of your page; whatās the user-intent youāre trying to cover? If youāre adding random information to a category page, is it still an ecommerce page for users with āshoppingā intents? Make up your mind, focus, donāt blindly stuff text.ā
Another one, John Mueller: The one thing that I notice in talking with the mobile indexing folks is that when the ecommerce category pages donāt have any other content at all other than links to the products then itās really hard for us to rank those pages. So Iām not saying all of that text at the bottom of your page is bad but maybe 90%, 95% of that text is unnecessary but some amount of text is useful to have on a page so that we can understand what this page is about. And at that point you are probably with the amount of text that a user will probably be able to read as well, be able to understand as well. So thatās kind of where I would head in that regard. The other thing where I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused is when they have a list of products on top and essentially a giant article on the bottom when our algorithms have to figure out the intent of this page. Is this something that is meant for commercial intent or is this an informational page? What is kind of the primary reason for this page to exist and I could imagine that our algorithms sometimes get confused by this big chunk of text whereād we say oh, this is an informational page about shoes but I can tell that users are trying to buy shoes so I wouldnāt send them to this informational page.
