How to fix seo category empty on PrestaShop

Steps for PrestaShop

1. In your PrestaShop back office, go to Catalog → Categories.
2. Click 'Edit' on the empty category.
3. Option A — Add products: Go to Catalog → Products, edit each product, and in the 'Categories' tab assign it to this category.
4. Option B — Noindex: PrestaShop does not have a built-in per-category noindex toggle. Install the 'SEO Expert' or 'Prestashop SEO' module. Alternatively, edit the category.tpl file in your theme (themes/[your-theme]/templates/catalog/category.tpl) and add a conditional: {if $category.nb_products == 0}<meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow'>{/if} inside the {block name='head_seo'} or equivalent block.
5. Option C — Delete & redirect: Delete the category in Catalog → Categories. Go to Shop Parameters → Traffic & SEO → URL Redirections and add a 301 redirect from the old category URL to the parent category URL.
6. Disable the category display in menus by toggling 'Displayed' to off in the category editor, or by removing it from the menu via Modules → Main Menu.

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.