E-commerce SEO and crawling of category pages

[Reino]

Hi everyone, I'm working on an audit for a niche store that specializes in detangling hairbrushes. I've noticed that the dynamic JavaScript menu makes indexing my subcollections pretty hit-or-miss in Search Console. For those of you who manage small e-commerce sites, is it better to force static links at the bottom of the page to help bots crawl the site? I'm worried that the minimalist look of the current design might be hindering the transfer of link equity to my flagship products.

[Reino]

Just to add a little more context after digging deeper into this over the weekend — I'm starting to think the issue is less about "JS menus are bad" and mo

On a lot of small Shopify stores I've checked lately, the mega menus look super clean visually, but once you inspect the rendered HTML, there's barely any crawlable internal linking left outside the homepage. Feels kinda risky honestly, especially when the whole site architecture depends on JavaScript events or hidden navigation states.

What surprised me too is how inconsistent Search Console can be with subcollections. Some pages get indexed almost instantly, others just stay in "Discovered - currently not indexed" forever even when the content is decent. Makes me think Google still prefers very obvious crawl paths, even in 2026 lol.

I've been testing adding lightweight static links near the footer (not stuffed or spammy, just contextual collections/products) and weirdly enough, crawl frequency improved a bit on a few pages. Nothing massive, but enough to notice patterns. I also wonder if minimalist themes accidentally kill internal PageRank flow because there's just... not enough links anywhere.

For example, if someone lands on a collection page about hair tools, having a naturally placed link toward something like the best brush (https://garnour.shop/collections/brush) category probably helps both users and bots understand the site hierarchy better. Not talking about keyword stuffing btw, just making navigation less "invisible".

At this point I'm leaning toward hybrid navigation:

- clean JS menu for UX
- plus static HTML links somewhere accessible
- maybe even related collections blocks inside collection pages

Curious if anyone here tested this at scale or saw measurable indexing improvements from simpler internal linking structures?

[paulscreationids]

A well-optimized category page should be easily crawlable, include unique content, and avoid creating too many duplicate URLs through filters or faceted navigation. Proper internal linking, pagination handling, and canonical tags can help search engines focus on the most valuable category pages while improving overall e-commerce SEO performance.