How to fix seo category empty on BigCommerce

Steps for BigCommerce

1. Go to Products → Product Categories in your BigCommerce control panel.
2. Locate the empty category (you can sort or filter by product count).
3. Option A — Add products: Open each relevant product under Products → View, edit it, and assign it to this category in the 'Categories' field.
4. Option B — Noindex: Open the category editor, scroll to the 'Search Engine Optimization' section, find 'Custom URL and SEO settings', and in the custom template or footer scripts section inject: <meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow'>. Alternatively, use a script in Storefront → Script Manager targeting only that category page's URL.
5. Option B (easier): Use the 'SEO Manager' or 'Amasty SEO Suite' BigCommerce app to set noindex on individual categories via a dashboard toggle.
6. Option C — Delete & redirect: Delete the category via the category editor. Then go to Server Settings → 301 Redirects and add a redirect from the old URL to the parent category.
7. Ensure the category is removed from any navigation menu under Storefront → Navigation.

What is seo category empty?

A category (also called a collection) page that contains zero products is considered "thin content" by search engines. There is nothing of substance for Google to index — no product listings, no descriptions, no prices — just a shell of a page. This can happen when you create a category in advance, remove all products from it, or when seasonal inventory runs out and is never restocked.

Google actively discounts thin-content pages, and having too many of them across your site can drag down the quality signal for your entire domain, hurting rankings across all your pages — not just the empty one. Empty category pages also waste Google's crawl budget: every minute spent crawling a blank page is a minute not spent discovering your actual product and blog pages. From a user perspective, a shopper who lands on an empty category will immediately leave (high bounce rate) and lose trust in your store, directly costing you conversions and revenue. Removing or hiding these pages is one of the highest-return, lowest-effort technical SEO wins available to any store owner.

See the complete Seo category empty guide for every platform and the full background.