Different breadcrumbs for each productpage
-
Hi all,
I have a question related to the breadcrumb. We have an e-commerce site. There is a difference in the breadcrumb when navigating to our products vs directly browsing to the URL of the product.
When you navigate to the product the breadcrumb looks like this (also in the source code):
Home > Sand > Sandpit sand > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyzWhen you visit the product URL directly, the breadcrumb looks like this (also in the source code):
Home > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyzLooks to me that can be confusing for a search engine and that it is unclear what the site's structure/hierarchy is like (and also for a user of course). Is that true? If yes, does this have a big direct negative impact looking at SEO?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for your answer! I will discuss it with our developer. But good to know it isn't a huge problem regarding SEO.
-
Hello Amagard,
Your breadcrumb is generated based on the path taken to the product, not the canonical categorization or taxonomy. Is that correct?
It does affect SEO in that your internal link structure changes depending on the path a bot takes through the site. The best practice would be to have the breadcrumb on product pages use the taxonomy of their canonical category, as opposed to the path taken to get there. In your example that would be: Home > Sand > Sandpit sand > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyz .
I have seen this many times. Sometimes it is very difficult to fix and would require a lot of development time due to the way an eCommerce platform is built. If that is the case with your situation, know that this is not something that will cripple your SEO. It isn't optimal, but your concern should be from a user's perspective. And, from a user's perspective, it can make sense to be able to see the path you took to get to a product.
However, if you can fix it so the breadcrumb always shows the canonical path, which includes category and sub-category, I would do so.
-
Ok, I got it, so first how these breadcrumbs are generated? I mean usually, this will affect not your SEO but in some cases, plugins such as Yoast can create the breadcrumb and also the schema for that breadcrumb in that case you will have to fix the problem or delete them
-
Hi,
Thanks for your response, really appreciate it!
There is not a DC issue; there is only 1 URL. Only the breadcrumb is differs, depending on the way you reach the page (navigating vs directly browsing to the page).
Hopefully you understand what I mean.
Best
-
Hi
Seen your case looks like you have big issue, with your site structure and also with your canonical tags I mean if you have
- Home > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyz
- Home > Sand > Sandpit sand > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyz
Then you have 2 pages competing for the same keywords usually will ignore both of them
So first need to know to define the source of the problem, in my experience, this usually occurs when you don't set up correctly the parent and child pages, also you will need to check your site taxonomy ( trust me on e-commerce is even more crucial than link building) a bad taxonomy can ruin all your efforts, also depending on the size of your site can require a lot of time.
The best tool in my opinion (experience) to fix the error Screamingfrog, Semrush and Dynomapper ( this one is almost mandatory)
Good Luck
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best way to handle Breadcrumbs for Blog Posts in multiple categories?
The site in question uses Wordpress. They have a Resources section that is broken into two categories (A or B). Underneath each of these categories is 5 or 6 subcategories. The structure looks like this: /p/main-category-a/subcategory/blog-post-name /p/main-category-b/subcategory/blog-post-name All posts have a main category, but other posts often have multiple subcategories while some posts also fall into both main categories. What would be the easiest or most effective way to auto-populate the breadcrumb based on from where the person reached the blog post? So for example, a way to set Home -> Main Category -> Subcategory 1 as the breadcrumb if they reach it from the Subcategory 1 landing page. Or is this not possible and we should just set the breadcrumb manually based on where we feel it best lives? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Alces0 -
Breadcrumbs on Mobile How important are they for SEO?
Due to Poor unsightly look of breadcrumbs and the space it takes up above the fold we only employ breadcrumbs on our desktop version. Breadcrumbs are hidden from view on mobile version. However as mobile first indexing is now in play what technical SEO impacts will this have? one thing that comes to mind is crawling deeper pages where breadcrumbs made them accessible in less than 3 link clicks? But i am unsure now of the impacts of not having breadcrumbs visible for mobile version of our site.
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Some of the employees have done by mistake on wrong spelling word and the only difference was
hi, Some of the employees have done by mistake on wrong spelling word and the only difference was: difference of "a" he was doing for over 3-4 months the website has started coming on top for those wrong spelled keyword. Now currently he has started to do on right word. I have some questions:
Technical SEO | | Amtoj
Will my SEO for correct spelling keyword, be affected with this wrong spelling ? Can i save my efforts somehow ? There was 2 more keywords attached with it ( whose spelling was correct ) , so will i have to submit more directories, articles etc so will my seo get affected for those keywords for overwork ? Thanks0 -
Why does google show two different titles for my rankings?
I have two keywords I am ranked for but google is showing two different title tags. One is the more updated version while the other is the older version. In all in one seo pack it shows the updated title tag but google still shows the old Why is this?
Technical SEO | | junkcars0 -
Can the Breadcrumb Trail be used as the H1 tag?
We hace recently discovered that the x-cart sites we have dont have H1 tags. Can the breadcrumb trail on the category and sub category pages be used as the H1 tag?
Technical SEO | | heathshowman0 -
Breadcrumbs how important are they
Hi, i am working on a joomla template site and i am just wondering how important the breadcrumbs are. I have one installed at the moment but what i have noticed is, what is showing on the main menu is showing on the breadcrumbs so i am not sure if i really need the breadcrumbs module. any help and advice would be great
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Why would a link shown on OSE appear differently than the page containing the link?
I recently traded links with a site that I will call www.example.com When I used open site explorer to check the link it came back with a different page authority as www.example.com/index.htm yet the link does appear on the www.example.com page. Why would this be?
Technical SEO | | casper4340