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
-
Homepage name in Breadcrumb for schema.org
Hi all, We have recently implemented the schema.org structure for our breadcrumbs. In our breadcrumb we include a link to the homepage. Since implementation I'm receiving the following error in Google Search Console: Either "name" or "item.name" should be specified The error is being triggered because we don't have itemprop="name" defined for the homepage on each page. Our breadcrumbs look good in search but I'm wondering if anybody else has experienced this error and what can we do to fix it. Should itemprop="name" be our Brand name? Or should we define this as our root domain? Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | Brando160 -
Very different serp rankings for different countries
Hi! A client of mine has a global presence and we are therefore tracking serp rankings for multiple Google domains; google.com, google.ie, google.co.uk for example. One page is ranking quite well in Google.ie (position 11 right now) while at the same time ranking extremely bad in both Google.com and Google.co.uk (position 100+). How can that be?? I did do some optimization (for example Title and Desc) before the rankings in .com and .co.uk went really bad (they were higher before (pos 30-40)). But it is the same page Google indexes...but the results are very different. How can this be? What can be done? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | JHultqvist
Jesper1 -
Approach for an established site looking to serve different content to regions in a single country/lang
Hi guys, I have an established site that currently serves the same content to all regions - west and east - in a single country with the same language. We are now looking to vary the content across west and east regions - not dramatically, but the products offered will be slightly different. From what i gather, modifying the url is best for countries, so feels like overkill for regions within the same country. I'm also unlikely to have very unique content, outside of the varied products, so I'm mindful of duplicate/similar content, but I know I can use canonical tags to address. I have a fairly modern CMS that can target content based on region, but mindful of upsetting Google re; showing different content to what the bot might encounter, assuming this is still a thing. So, three questions from an SEO perspective - Do i need to really focus on changing my url structure, especially as I'm already established in a competitive market, or will I do more harm than good? Is the region in the URL a strong signal? If I should make some changes to the url and/or metadata, what are the best bang for buck changes you would make? How does Google Local fit into this? Is it a separate process via webmaster tools, or does it align to the above changes? Cheers!!! Jez
Technical SEO | | jez0000 -
How to implement schema.org for different hotel rooms types
I'm working on a resort that has different type of rooms available. Does anyone know how to use schema.org to set it a hotel with different hotel room types. I looked at the hotel schema but I did not see any room types. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ppapola0 -
Is it best to create multiple xml sitemaps for different sections of a site?
I have a client with a very big site that includes a blog, videos, photo gallery, etc. Is it best to create a separate xml file for each of these sections? It seems to me like that would be the best way to keep everything organized. Or at least separate the blog out from the main site. Does anybody have any tips or recommendations? I'm not finding any good information about this.
Technical SEO | | MichaelWeisbaum0 -
Will moving a well established Blog to a different URL (on the same domain) affect the SERPs?
Hi SEOmoz experts, We will shortly be launching a new product range (B-Events) on our Events website and I was wondering if moving our current A-Events specific blog will impact the SERPs at all? Quite a few of our blog posts rank well for longtail A-Events terms, so we're a little reluctant to move it. But for the long term it makes more sense than creating & maintaining 2 separate blogs. Current Blog URL: domain.com/a-events/blog New Blog URL: domain.com/news New A-Events Category: domain.com/news/a-events New B-Events Category: domain.com/news/b-events I intend to 301 redirect all of the old URLs (200+) to their new blog category equivalent, will this be enough to keep their positions in the SERPs? Can you recommend / think of anything else, that we might not have considered. Any help would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | RobertHill0 -
Checkout on different domain
Is it a bad SEO move to have a your checkout process on a separate domain instead of the main domain for a ecommerce site. There is no real content on the checkout pages and they are completely new pages that are not indexed in the search engines. Do to the backend architecture it is impossibe for us to have them on the same domain. An example is this page: http://www.printingforless.com/2/Brochure-Printing.html One option we've discussed to not pass page rank on to the checkout domain by iFraming all of the links to the checkout domain. We could also move the checkout process to a subdomain instead of a new domain. Please ignore the concerns with visitors security and conversion rate. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | PrintingForLess.com0 -
For a UK business where there is no .co.uk or .com opportunity, is it better to have a .net address or would .uk.com be better? Or no difference...This company is UK focussed only.
We have a niche keyword domain possibility but I am not sure which way, if any, is better. The .com and .co.uk options are not available but there are various other ones - including .org, .net, .uk.com. Is there any domain/seo benefit of one version over another? Any thought gratefully received..
Technical SEO | | cpdigital10