Altering Breadcrumbs based on User Path to Product URL

[FashionLux]

Hi,

Our products are listed in multiple categories, and as the URLs are path dependent (example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/, example.com/fruit/green-fruit/granny-smith/ and so forth) we canonicalise to the 'default' URL (in this case example.com/fruit/apples/granny-smith/).

For mainly crawling bandwidth issues I'm looking to change all product URL's to path neutral so there is only ever one URL per product (example.com/granny-smith/), but still list the product in multiple categories.

If a user comes directly to example.com/granny-smith/ then the breadcrumbs will use the default path "Fruit > Apples", however if the user navigated to the product via another category then I'd like the breadcrumbs to reflect this. I'm not worried about cloaking as it's not based on user-agent and it's very logical why it's being done so I don't expect a penalty.

My question is - how do you recommend this is achieved from a technical standpoint? Many sites use path neutral product URL's (Ikea, PCWorld etc) but none alter the breadcrumbs depending upon path.

Our site is mostly behind a CDN so it has to be a client side solution. I currently view the options as:

• Store Path to product in a cookie and/or browsers local-cache
• Attach the Path details after a # in the URL and use Javascript to alter breadcrumbs onload with JQuery
• When a user clicks to a product from a listing page, use AJAX to pull in the product info but leave the rest of the page (including the breadcrumbs) as-is, updating the URL accordingly

Do you think any of these wouldn't work? Do you have a preference on which one is best? Is there another method you'd recommend?

We also have "Next/Previous" functionality (links to the previous and next product URLs) on the page so I suspect we'd need to attach the path after a # and make another round trip to the server onload to update the previous and next links.

Finally, does anyone know of any sites that do update the breadcrumbs depending upon path?

Thanks in advance for your time

FashionLux

[danatanseo]

Dean,

This is a great, great question and I am eager to find out what my fellow technical SEOs think because I have faced very similar situations on one of my sites. Thanks for asking this question.

My gut instinct is to select #3 of your options. But not really being a developer, it's hard for me to articulate as to why I think this is the best option. I am really only thinking of it from a user-end standpoint in that I want to know where, in the hierarchy of the site this page lives so that if I need to find it again, I can.

I disagree with your option #2 from an SEO standpoint because anything after a "#" or hashtag in a URL is ignored by search engines....so putting it there isn't going to benefit your SEO in any way.

Interested to hear what others think,

Dana

[FashionLux]

Thanks for the response Dana. Option 3 did feel like the best option and that is the one I'm choosing to go with.

Point 2 (with the hash) provides the desired result of Search Engines only seeing the clean URL as the parameters behind the hash will never be seen, but the browser will use them to power the breadcrumbs. In the end it was a toss-up between 2 & 3 but 3 is the most maintainable and quickest for users.

Thanks again

Dean

[FashionLux]

Further update to this. Ran into a problem with option 3... this solution works really well when navigating the site internally, however a user landing on one of these URL's directly (bookmark, social share etc) would have a slow loading page as (for non-default product variations) the page will load after the 1st request, then a 2nd request to the server is needed to pull in the image via AJAX.

Loading the other images, stock information, prices, copy etc into an array and doing the work on the client side wasn't an option as the page would get too heavy. So option 3 ruled out.

Ultimately the goal was to reduce duplicate content of product pages and none of the 3 options above do this whilst not affecting page loading times. I did look to fall back on using canonical tags however I've just now found that Facebook are using this tag, so if a user wanted to share a 'red apple' when the canonical is 'green apple' - Facebook would show an image of the 'green apple'.... so at the moment that is ruled out also.

I'll start a new thread on product page duplicates and the best solution - but if anyone has any ideas then please do let me know.

Thanks

Dean