Key Takeaways
- Hub pages solve the multi-intent problem: when a site has both transactional pages (products, services) and informational pages (guides, reviews) serving the same topic but living in separate architectural silos.
- Most enterprise sites unknowingly hemorrhage link equity through intermediary pages that target no real search volume — pages that exist only because someone built a taxonomy years ago and nobody questioned it.
- There are two paths to building hub pages: elevating existing category pages into hubs (lower risk, preferred) or creating standalone hub pages (when your category pages are weak). Most companies should choose the first path.
- The canonical breadcrumb path is your SEO source of truth. Merchandising teams can display content across as many categories as they want — that’s a UX decision, not an architectural one.
- Start your rollout with content-only categories that have high fragmentation and low traffic risk. Build internal proof points before tackling your highest-stakes categories.
- Hub page consolidation isn’t just a traditional SEO play. The same structural improvements — concentrated entity co-occurrence, tighter semantic clustering, simplified retrieval paths — make your content more extractable for AI answer engines too.
Why Site Architecture Is the Highest-Leverage SEO Project You Can Run
Most SEO work happens at the page level. You optimize a title tag here, publish a new guide there, build a few backlinks somewhere else. These are fine tactics. They move needles incrementally.
Site architecture projects are different. When you restructure how pages relate to each other — how link equity flows, how breadcrumbs define parent-child relationships, how content clusters around topics — you’re not optimizing one page. You’re changing the physics of how your entire site performs in search.
A well-executed architecture restructure can improve rankings across thousands of pages simultaneously. Category pages, product pages, guides, brand pages — they all benefit when link equity stops leaking through intermediary pages that serve no search purpose and starts concentrating on pages that actually target real demand.
This is what makes hub pages one of the most powerful tools in an SEO leader’s playbook. Not because the concept is complicated — it’s not. But because executing it requires coordination across SEO, product, engineering, merchandising, and content teams. That cross-functional complexity is exactly why so few companies do it well, and exactly why the competitive advantage is so durable when you get it right.
What Are Hub Pages?
Hub pages are landing pages that unify transactional and informational content under a single topic. They sit at the top of a category’s information hierarchy (typically L1 or L2) and serve as the architectural center of gravity for everything related to that topic — products, subcategories, editorial guides, brand pages, FAQs, and services.
This is not the same thing as a “pillar page” or a “topic cluster,” though you’ll hear those terms used interchangeably. The distinction matters. Pillar pages and topic clusters are content-marketing concepts — they describe a long-form article surrounded by supporting blog posts. That framework works fine for media companies and SaaS blogs. But it falls apart the moment you have commerce pages in the mix.
Hub pages in the commerce + content context aren’t long-form blog posts. They’re navigational landing pages that help both users and search engines understand the full scope of what your site offers about a topic. Think of Best Buy’s Speakers page, which links into subcategories (bookshelf speakers, soundbars, portable speakers), features popular products, surfaces related buying guides, and showcases featured brands — all from one architectural root.
The key difference: a pillar page tries to rank by containing information. A hub page tries to rank by organizing and linking to information. The hub itself might have modest on-page content. Its power comes from being the nexus where all the topically relevant pages converge.
Who Needs Hub Pages
Hub pages are most valuable for sites where someone can both learn and buy, and those two experiences are currently separated in the site architecture:
Ecommerce is the primary use case. If you sell products and also publish buying guides, brand comparisons, and how-to content — and those live in different sections of your site — you almost certainly need hub pages.
B2B companies with product or service pages alongside educational content face the same structural tension. Your pricing page, feature pages, and “How to Choose” guides should converge under a common architectural parent, not scatter across /products/, /resources/, and /blog/.
SaaS companies with pricing/feature pages alongside help documentation, case studies, and educational content benefit from the same pattern.
Marketplace sites where both supply-side and demand-side content needs to be discoverable are natural hub page candidates.
Who Doesn’t Need Hub Pages
Media companies and pure-content publishers don’t face the multi-intent tension that hub pages solve. If every page on your site is informational content, you’re not trying to bridge commerce and editorial silos — you don’t have commerce silos. Content hubs (in the traditional pillar/cluster sense) may serve you well, but the specific architectural patterns in this guide don’t apply.
When Do You Need Hub Pages?
You don’t need hub pages because a blog post told you to build them. You need them when your site architecture is actively working against your SEO performance. Here are the symptoms.
Symptom 1: Information Asymmetry
This is the most common and least diagnosed problem. Here’s what it looks like:
Your L1 and L2 pages — the ones closest to the homepage, linked from navigation menus, receiving the most internal links — target keywords with little or no meaningful search volume. “Shop,” “Guides,” “Resources,” “Gear” — these are navigational labels, not things real people search for.
Meanwhile, your L3 and L4 pages — the product listing pages, individual guides, and product detail pages that actually target high-volume keywords — are buried 3 or 4 clicks deep, receiving a fraction of the internal link equity.
The result is a mismatch between where your site’s ranking power lives and where it’s needed. Your strongest pages point at weak targets. Your pages with the strongest targets have the weakest authority.
To visualize this, imagine a scatterplot. On one axis, plot search volume. On the other, plot internal link count. In a healthy architecture, these two metrics correlate — pages targeting high-volume keywords receive proportionally more internal links. In most enterprise sites, they don’t. You’ll see a cluster of high-link, low-volume pages at the top (your navigation and intermediary category pages) and a cluster of low-link, high-volume pages at the bottom (your money pages).
Symptom 2: Content and Commerce in Separate Silos
Your products live under /shop/. Your guides live under /guides/ or /blog/ or /resources/ or /hello-baby/ or whatever your CMS decided to call it. Your brand pages live somewhere else entirely.
When a user searches for “copy paper,” they might want to buy copy paper, or they might want to learn which copy paper is best for high-volume printing. Your site has both pages. But they don’t know about each other architecturally. They live in different silos, under different parent pages, with different breadcrumb paths. The guide about copy paper doesn’t link to the copy paper product listing. The product listing doesn’t surface the guide.
A search engine crawling your site sees two disconnected treatment of the same topic. Instead of one concentrated signal that says “this site is the authority on copy paper,” it sees a fragmented signal spread across distant branches of your sitemap.
Consider a real-world pattern: a company might have breastfeeding-related content in three completely separate places — breast pump products under Shop > Nursing & Feeding > Breastfeeding, breast pump guides under Guides > Gear > Feeding, and insurance-related breast pump content under a Health section. Same topic, three silos, three sets of breadcrumbs, zero architectural connection between them.
Symptom 3: Weak Breadcrumbs Leaking Link Equity
Breadcrumbs aren’t just a UI element. Every breadcrumb link is an internal link, and on a site with hundreds or thousands of pages, those links add up fast.
When your content lives in multiple silos, your child pages (guides, product listing pages, PDPs) end up with excessive “parent” and “grandparent” categories in their breadcrumb paths. Every one of those breadcrumb links sends link equity to a parent page.
Here’s the problem: many of those parent pages target no real search volume. They exist as navigational containers — “Gear,” “Feeding,” “Resources.” Every internal link to those pages is a link that could have gone to a page that actually needs it to compete for a real keyword.
At scale, this becomes hundreds or thousands of wasted internal links flowing to pages with no SEO value. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a structural leak draining ranking power from the pages that drive traffic and revenue.
Symptom 4: Keyword Cannibalization
When multiple page types exist for the same topic across different silos, Google has to decide which one to rank. Often, it chooses inconsistently.
Take “best strollers” as a generalized example. A site might have a shop category page for strollers, a product listing page for single strollers, and a “Best Strollers” guide. All three pages are plausible results for the same query. Google has ranked all three at different times, rotating between them. The site’s pages compete against each other before they compete against external competitors.
This makes it harder to conquer and defend top rankings. Instead of one clearly authoritative page for “best strollers” with all the link equity and topical signals concentrated on it, you have three pages splitting the signal and confusing the ranking algorithm.
Two Paths to Building Hub Pages
There are two distinct approaches, and choosing the wrong one can be expensive. They solve the same problem but have different prerequisites, costs, and risk profiles.
Path A: Elevate Existing Category Pages
If your shop already has established category landing pages (CLPs) with meaningful link equity and crawl history, the lower-risk path is to enrich those existing pages rather than building something from scratch.
In practice, this means taking your existing category page — say, your Paper category page in the shop — and expanding it with editorial content sections, related guide links, featured brands, and FAQ content. The URL stays the same. The page authority carries forward. You’re building on what you already have.
The advantage is obvious: you inherit all the existing equity. The page already has internal links from navigation, backlinks from external sources, and years of crawl history. You’re not starting from zero.
The execution looks like this: your existing CLP at /store/paper becomes the hub for everything paper-related. Buying guides, brand comparison pages, and product listing pages all point to it as their parent. The guide listing page that previously lived at /guides/office-supplies/paper gets 301 redirected to the CLP-turned-hub. The guides themselves get re-breadcrumbed under the hub.
Path B: Create Standalone Hub Pages
Sometimes your category pages are too weak or too constrained by your CMS to serve as hubs. Maybe they’re auto-generated with no CMS control. Maybe they’re thin product grids with no room for editorial content. Maybe the URL structure makes it architecturally awkward.
In those cases, you build standalone hub pages that live outside the shop — a new page at /h/paper or /topics/paper that links into both your shop category page and your editorial content. These pages require more upfront work because they start with no equity, but they give you full CMS control over the layout and content.
Which Path to Choose
The decision comes down to what you’re working with. If your category pages have strong equity and your CMS allows you to add content blocks, editorial sections, and structured internal links — choose Path A. It’s lower risk, faster to implement, and preserves existing authority.
If your category pages are auto-generated, template-locked, or architecturally constrained — choose Path B. Accept the higher upfront cost in exchange for full control.
Both paths can coexist on the same site. You might elevate your top 10 shop categories into hubs using Path A while creating standalone hubs for topics that don’t have a natural shop category (like a “Pregnancy” hub that spans products, content, and services).
Anatomy of a Hub Page
A well-designed hub page isn’t a long-form article. It’s a landing page with modular components, each serving a specific SEO function. Here’s what goes on one, with real examples from sites doing it well.
Shop by Category / Subcategory Links
The most important component. These are configurable links to subcategory pages — not a sidebar navigation dump, but curated visual cards or tiles that guide users to the next level of specificity.
Best Buy does this well on their TV & Home Theater hub. The “Shop TVs by type” section shows visual tiles for OLED TVs, Gaming TVs, Smart TVs, with both subcategory links and attribute-based filter links (TVs by Size). Each tile is an internal link to a page targeting a real keyword.
For a B2B office supplies site, the Paper hub page would show tiles for Copy Paper, Specialty Paper, Paper by Brand, Recycled Paper — each linking to a subcategory page.
The SEO function: concentrated internal links to the pages that actually target high-volume subcategory keywords.
Featured / Most Popular Products
A curated selection of products that surface high-value PDPs on the hub. Jordan’s “Popular Right Now” section and Amazon’s “Most Wished For” sections both serve this purpose — they create internal links to product detail pages directly from an L1 or L2 page, dramatically shortening the click depth.
The SEO function: PDPs move from L3/L4 to effectively L2/L3 in terms of link proximity to the hub. This concentrates equity on your revenue-generating pages.
Related Editorial Guides
This is where content meets commerce. A section featuring your most important buying guides, how-to articles, and comparison pieces related to the hub topic.
HP does this with “Related Articles” carousels on their laptop hub pages — linking to laptop buying guides, comparison articles, and gift guides. Backlinko’s SEO Marketing Hub 2.0 takes the editorial approach further, organizing all related guides into a visual navigation system. Bankrate surfaces “Editor’s Picks” on their credit card hub with featured reviews and guides.
The SEO function: editorial content that previously lived in a distant silo now has a direct architectural connection to the commerce hub. This builds topical authority — search engines see that your site doesn’t just sell paper, it also explains which paper to buy, compares brands, and answers common questions. All under one roof.
Featured Brands
A section showcasing the major brands within the category, each linking to a brand-specific landing page or filtered product listing.
Best Buy’s TV hub shows “Featured TV Brands” with Samsung, LG, Sony, and TCL logos linking to brand-specific pages. AutoZone does this with their auto parts hubs, featuring both third-party and owned brands.
The SEO function: brand + category keyword combinations (“Hammermill copy paper,” “HP printer paper”) are high-intent commercial queries. Brand sections create internal links to pages targeting these combinations.
Owned Brand Spotlight
If your company has private-label or owned brands, the hub is the place to feature them. AutoZone’s Duralast spotlight section is a strong example — it’s a branded callout with description and links to popular owned-brand products.
The SEO function: internal links to owned-brand pages, plus E-E-A-T signals showing the company’s direct expertise in the category.
Product + Content Tabs
REI pioneered this pattern with their category pages that include both a “Products” tab and an “Expert Advice” tab within the same page experience. Users (and crawlers) can access both product listings and editorial content from a single URL.
The SEO function: one page address serves both transactional and informational intent, eliminating the silo entirely for this category.
FAQs and Explainer Copy
Bottom-of-page FAQ sections and introductory explainer copy serve two purposes. For users, they answer common questions without requiring a click. For search engines, they provide on-page topical content that strengthens the hub’s relevance for long-tail queries.
The SEO function: on-page content signals that complement the internal linking structure. Particularly valuable for AI answer engine extractability, where FAQ content structured with question-and-answer patterns is easily parseable by LLMs.
How to Prioritize a Hub Page Rollout
You can’t restructure 30 categories simultaneously. You need a sequencing strategy that builds confidence with stakeholders while minimizing risk.
Start with Content-Only Categories
If you have categories that contain only informational content — no products, no commerce pages, just guides and articles — start there. These are the lowest-risk candidates because there’s no revenue at stake if something goes wrong during the transition.
The goal is to prove the concept. Clean up the taxonomy. Consolidate scattered guides under a proper hub. Update breadcrumbs. Show that organic traffic improved for the category after consolidation. Get the win on the board.
Graduate to Mixed Commerce + Content
Once you’ve demonstrated results with content-only categories, move to categories where both commerce and content exist but are currently siloed. This is where the real impact lives — and where the real organizational complexity begins, because now you need buy-in from merchandising, product, and engineering teams.
Pick categories with high fragmentation and high upside potential. Don’t start with your highest-traffic category — start with one where the current architecture is clearly broken (multiple silos, significant cannibalization) but the absolute traffic volume means a temporary dip won’t trigger alarm bells.
The Prioritization Matrix
Evaluate each potential hub along two axes: fragmentation severity (how scattered is the content today?) and traffic risk (how much could you lose if the migration has a rough transition?).
Categories with high fragmentation and low traffic risk are your “start here” candidates. Categories with high fragmentation and high traffic risk are Phase 2 — tackle them once you’ve proven the playbook. Categories with low fragmentation require less work and can be addressed opportunistically. Categories with low fragmentation and high risk are the ones to deprioritize — you’re taking risk for minimal architectural improvement.
What Happens to Existing Pages
When you consolidate silos into hub pages, not every page survives unchanged. Here’s the decision tree for each page type.
Category Landing Pages (CLPs) in the Shop
Action: Elevate to hub pages (Path A).
Your existing shop CLPs become the hubs. They keep their URLs, their link equity, and their crawl history. You enrich them with additional content sections — editorial guides, brands, FAQs — turning them from thin product grids into rich topic hubs.
Guide Listing Pages (GLPs) / Article Collection Pages
Action: Redirect to the corresponding hub page.
These are the pages like /guides/gear/strollers or /hello-baby/feeding that list all guides within a category. They exist as navigational intermediaries in the content section. They don’t rank for any unique search terms — if someone searches for “strollers,” they’ll find your shop CLP or your “Best Strollers” guide, not the guide listing page.
All these pages are doing is consuming link equity without returning unique search value. 301 redirect them to the hub and recapture that equity for pages that need it.
The redirect risk here is minimal. These pages don’t drive meaningful organic traffic because they don’t align with any real search demand that isn’t already better served by another page type.
Individual Guides
Action: Keep, but re-parent under the hub.
Your individual guides stay as individual pages. They’re your highest-value content — “Best Copy Paper for High-Volume Printing,” “How to Choose a Printer Paper Weight” — and they target specific, high-intent keywords.
What changes is their breadcrumb path. Instead of Home > Guides > Office Supplies > Paper > Best Copy Paper, they become Home > Paper Hub > Best Copy Paper. They move up 1-2 levels in the hierarchy, meaning they’re now closer to the homepage and receive more concentrated link equity from their parent.
High-Value Landing Pages (HVLPs)
Action: House under a relevant hub, but keep as distinct pages.
These are pages that serve a distinct purpose — a “Why Choose [Brand]” page, a registry checklist, a calculator tool. They don’t merge into the hub, but they get re-parented so the hub is their architectural parent. Their breadcrumbs update accordingly.
Product Detail Pages (PDPs)
Action: No change to the pages themselves.
PDPs stay as-is. They’re the deepest nodes in the hierarchy. What changes is their breadcrumb structure — now pointing to the hub as their category parent — which means they benefit from the concentrated equity flowing down from the hub.
The Primary Parent Rule
When you consolidate content under hubs, merchandising teams will push back. “My category page lost three guides.” “I need that article to show up in two different sections.” “The buying guide about copy paper also applies to the printer section.”
This is the number one political objection you’ll face. Here’s how to solve it.
Every page gets exactly one primary parent. This primary parent determines the canonical breadcrumb path, which is the SEO source of truth for where that page lives in the hierarchy. The breadcrumb is always the same regardless of how the user navigated to the page.
Merchandising and editorial teams can display that page in as many other categories as they want. Cross-listing is a display concern, not an architectural one. The guide about copy paper can appear in the Paper hub, the Printers hub, and the Sustainability hub. But its breadcrumb always reads Home > Paper > Best Copy Paper for High-Volume Printing.
This is the same concept as primary vs. secondary category assignments in faceted navigation optimization. The primary assignment determines the SEO truth. Secondary assignments are free for business use.
The key message for directors: you’re not removing anyone’s ability to surface content. You’re defining where it lives architecturally so that search engines see a clear, consistent signal rather than conflicting breadcrumb paths from multiple silos.
Hub Pages and Answer Engine Optimization
Everything described in this guide — consolidating silos, concentrating link equity, unifying breadcrumbs, building topical hubs — was sound SEO strategy before AI answer engines existed. But the rise of LLM-powered search makes it even more important.
Here’s why.
AI answer engines like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity don’t crawl the web themselves. They rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines that pull from existing search indexes — primarily Google and Bing. The same structural signals that help your pages rank in traditional search also determine whether your content gets retrieved and cited by AI systems.
When all your content about a topic lives under one architectural roof — products, guides, brand pages, FAQs — the semantic clustering is tighter. The entities (products, brands, attributes, editorial analysis) are all interlinked within the same hub, creating a dense entity graph that LLMs can extract more efficiently.
Think about it from the perspective of cosine similarity and vector embeddings. Tightly clustered content about “office paper” across product pages, buying guides, and brand comparisons will have higher semantic similarity scores than the same content scattered across /shop/, /guides/, and /brands/. When an AI system retrieves passages for a query about office paper, the concentrated hub architecture means your content is more likely to be retrieved as a coherent set of passages rather than isolated fragments.
The cost of retrieval matters too. AI systems running RAG pipelines benefit when authoritative content is architecturally concentrated rather than spread thin across distant nodes. A hub page that links to 15 related resources about copy paper is a more efficient retrieval target than those same 15 resources living in 5 different sections of your site.
This isn’t about adopting new AEO tactics. It’s about recognizing that the same structural improvements — fewer silos, concentrated equity, clean breadcrumbs, unified topic hubs — pay dividends across both traditional search rankings and AI answer engine citations. Good site architecture IS answer engine optimization.
Golden Rules
✅ Build on existing equity whenever possible. Path A (elevating CLPs) preserves years of link authority and crawl history. Only create standalone hubs when your category pages are genuinely unworkable.
✅ Define primary parents before you start building. Every page needs one canonical breadcrumb path. Decide this upfront with merchandising and content teams, not mid-migration.
✅ Start with quick wins. Content-only categories with high fragmentation and low traffic risk. Build the case internally before tackling your highest-stakes categories.
✅ Move content closer to the homepage. Every level you remove between the homepage and a guide or product page concentrates more link equity on that page. Hub pages should sit at L1 or L2.
✅ Redirect dead weight. Guide listing pages and intermediary category pages that target no real search volume are consuming equity without returning value. 301 redirect them and recapture that equity for pages that need it.
✅ Keep breadcrumbs consistent. No matter how a user navigates to a page, the breadcrumb should always show the same canonical path. This is non-negotiable for the SEO benefits to hold.
Silver Rules
⚠️ Don’t confuse hub pages with pillar pages. Pillar pages are content-marketing concepts for blog-centric sites. Hub pages are architectural solutions for sites with multi-intent tension. Applying the pillar page playbook to an ecommerce site will leave your commerce pages orphaned.
⚠️ Don’t overstate crawl budget benefits. Hub consolidation does marginally improve crawl efficiency by reducing the number of low-value intermediary pages, but on a site with hundreds of thousands of pages being crawled daily, you won’t notice the difference. The real value is link equity concentration and topical authority, not crawl budget savings.
⚠️ Don’t start with your highest-traffic category. The redirect and breadcrumb changes during hub consolidation temporarily disrupts the internal link graph for every page in the affected silo. Start where the downside is manageable.
⚠️ Don’t merge pages that serve distinct intents. A product listing page and a buying guide both relate to “copy paper,” but they serve different searchers. The hub unifies them architecturally — it doesn’t merge them into one page.
⚠️ Don’t skip the taxonomy cleanup. Hub pages built on top of a messy taxonomy just organize the mess more efficiently. Clean up duplicate categories, standardize naming conventions, and resolve any taxonomy inconsistencies before you start building hubs. If you have both “Nursing & Feeding” and “Nursing & Feedings” as separate categories, fix that first.
⚠️ Don’t ignore the indirect effects of breadcrumb restructuring. When you redirect a guide listing page and update breadcrumbs, the old parent pages that were receiving those breadcrumb links lose internal links at scale. The net effect is positive because that equity is being redistributed to pages that need it, but acknowledge the transition to stakeholders upfront.
Related Reading
- Site Architecture for SEO — The parent guide covering the diagnostic framework: information asymmetry, the four symptoms, the primary parent rule, and breadcrumb restructuring as an architectural discipline.
- Faceted Navigation Optimization for SEO — How to make filter pages work for SEO, including primary vs. secondary category assignments and the single-product redirect rule.
- Website Migrations for SEO — The operational playbook for managing URL changes, redirect mapping, and post-migration monitoring.
- CMS Migrations for SEO — When your hub page project requires a CMS change, this guide covers the SEO-safe migration path.
- Mobile-First Migrations for SEO — How mobile-first architecture decisions affect crawler access and content parity, with direct implications for hub page design.
