Introduction
The confusion between hub pages and category pages usually starts with naming. Both aggregate. Both link out. Both often sit high in the hierarchy. Structurally, though, they behave very differently once a site grows beyond a few thousand URLs. I’ve seen projects where treating a category as a hub stalled authority flow for years. Nothing broke. Nothing ranked either.
Two page types, two different jobs
A category page exists to partition inventory or content. Its primary role is classification. A hub page exists to concentrate and redistribute authority. Mixing those roles is where most large sites quietly lose momentum.
From crawl data on sites in the 50k–500k URL range, category pages typically receive 60–80% of their internal links from navigation templates. Hubs, when they work, get a disproportionate share of contextual links from editorial or evergreen pages. That difference alone changes how often they are revisited and how much signal they accumulate over time.
John Mueller has repeatedly pointed out that internal links are understood in context, not just counted. Links embedded in navigation help discovery; links embedded in content help interpretation. Categories mostly provide the former. Hubs are designed for the latter.
This is where hierarchical taxonomy matters. When hierarchy reflects intent, categories reduce ambiguity. When hierarchy is overloaded with explanatory content, the system has to guess what the page is. Guessing costs time.
How authority actually accumulates
On large sites, authority does not move evenly. Log analysis and internal PageRank simulations show a familiar pattern: roughly 3–5% of URLs carry the majority of accumulated weight. These are almost never raw category pages unless the site is extremely shallow.
A hub works because it sits at the intersection of multiple crawl paths. It is linked from articles, guides, tools, and sometimes categories themselves. That repetition matters. Gary Illyes has described internal linking as a way to tell systems “this page is important to us.” Importance is inferred from frequency and consistency, not from labels.
When internal links stop reinforcing a page, weight decays. That decay process is slow and often invisible, which is why when links stop passing weight usually shows up months after a structural change, not immediately.
Category pages under load
Categories scale poorly as authority concentrators. As inventory grows, they fragment into paginated states, filtered variants, and edge cases. Even with canonicalization, the crawler still has to sample those states.
In practice, this leads to two effects:
- revisit frequency spreads across many near-equivalent URLs,
- confidence in any single representative drops.
That sampling behaviour is one reason category-driven architectures often suffer delayed updates, something closely related to indexation latency problems observed on large ecommerce and media sites.
Hub pages under load
Hubs are not immune to failure. When they turn into dumping grounds for links, they lose clarity. I’ve seen hubs with 300+ outgoing links where nothing ranked. The issue wasn’t dilution per se, but lack of grouping. Systems could not infer dominant themes.
However, when hubs are constrained and reinforced, they behave differently. In several audits of sites above 100k URLs, well-linked hubs were revisited 2–4× more often than adjacent category pages at similar depth. Updates propagated faster. Canonical decisions stabilized sooner.
Structural comparison
| Dimension | Category Page | Hub Page |
|---|---|---|
| Primary role | Classification | Authority concentration |
| Typical link source | Navigation templates | Contextual editorial links |
| Behaviour at scale | Fragmentation, sampling | Reinforcement, consolidation |
| Update reflection speed | Often delayed | Usually faster |
| Failure mode | Becomes noisy | Becomes unfocused |
Where people get it wrong
The common mistake is trying to make one page do both jobs. A category that explains, educates, and funnels authority ends up doing none of those cleanly. A hub that tries to list everything becomes indistinguishable from a category.
I don’t think this is controversial anymore, but it’s still ignored in practice. Tools don’t flag it. Dashboards don’t show it. You only see it when you trace crawl paths and watch which URLs actually get revisited.
Conclusion
Hub pages and category pages are not interchangeable. Categories organize. Hubs concentrate.
On small sites, the difference barely matters. At scale, it decides where authority settles and how fast changes propagate. If a page’s role is ambiguous, the system treats it cautiously. And cautious systems move slowly. That’s the part people notice last.