Creating category structure

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Josh Mitchy: Its really not going to matter too much which way you do it. Its a competitive topic though and unless you get very granular with the topics it will be challenging to rank for. Alot of big affiliate sites cover these products for reviews. Some bigger home sites cover the DIY topics too. Just cause your knowledge may be greater, its hard to top their domain/page rank
• 
  Andy Trigg: Thanks Josh. I rank pretty well really. My sites are 13 and 20 years old and very well established. I don`t compete on the selling aspect, which as you say is highly competitive, and littered with big budget companies. I just advertise those kind of companies and my visitors come for help and advice about all aspects of the topic when they search for more longtail queries as opposed to actually buying.
  
  I`ve just always struggled to decide which is the best way to do the categories because each individual appliance is its own category, but they all have the same subcategories like they all have their own safety advice, repair advice, reviews. I was just hoping there was an accepted best way of doing it for ease of use of users and SEO.
• 
  Michael Martinez: On a WordPress site (in my opinion) you should avoid using sub-categories. Each category archive includes all the posts from each of its sub-category archives. While these duplicate listings don`t impede a site`s search engine rankings in any way, they create a very confusing user experience.
  
  You could try using tags to highlight important attributes across multiple product categories, but even there I think you`d create an unnecessary number of archives.
  
  That said, don`t try to compensate for a plethora of archive indexes by using "nonindex" directives on them. The search engines will ignore as desired, but they won`t follow the links, either. And those archive indexes make excellent crawl pathways for older, deeper Posts.