Site architecture & breadcrumbs

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

A client hasn't structured site architecture in a silo type format so breadcrumbs are not predicating in a topical hierarchy as one would desire (or at least i think one would prefer)

For example: say the site is called www.fruit.com and it has a category called 'types of fruit' and then sub/content pages called things like 'apples' and 'pears'. So in terms of architecture that should be: www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit/apples  and  www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit/pears etc etc

The client has kept it all flat so instead architecture is:  www.fruit.com/types-of-fruit  and www.fruit.com/apples  and www.fruit.com/pears

As a result breadcrumbs follow suit and hence since also not employing logical predication dont reflect the topical & sub-topical hierarchy

I have seen that some seo's at least used to think this was better for seo since kept the page/s nearer the root but surely its better to structure site architecture in a logical topical hierarchy so long as dont go beyond say 3 or 4 directories/forward slashes in the url's?

Also is it theoretically possible to keep url structure as is (flat) and just edit/customise the breadcrumbs to reflect a topical hierarchy in a silo structure rather than change the entire site architecture & required 301'ing etc in order to do this (or is that misleading or just not possible?)

Cheers

Dan

[JarnoNijzing]

Dan,

i get what you are saying and as a matter of fact I'm currently involved in a test about this subject on a clients page. Putting files up as near to the root as possible and putting files in special folders and measuring the ranking capability and effectiveness of those pages.

However, for makeup of the URL I would prefer the folder version (domain/folder/file) since that looks more natural to me.

And there is always the fact of duplicate pages in that case. For instance, I've just written a plan for a new website in the netherlands. This website will enlist different kind of companies in different categories per province. So the same category gets to exist in the province Groningen but also in Drenthe.

Therefor I need to use: domainname/Groningen/Category/filename.

Do you feel that that's the best decision on this case? I will net you know about my test as soon as I see some results.

regards

Jarno

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

I don't really think that the existence or lack of the category on the url is going to be a major problem for ranking as long as other factors are lining up. As Jarno says though, it has an effect on how human users view the url, influencing perhaps how they share it and there is also a data analysis issue where it might be nice to be able to filter by category name in analytics etc to get a more detailed overview by various categories separately.

Whether to change the url structure is up to you and depends on a number of factors including CMS used, man hours needed etc. Depending on the complexity, I would probably be inclined to do it if it helps make the urls more readable for humans. In regards your second question, it is certainly technically possible to make a custom breadcrumb trail. Whether it would have an effect on rankings or not is debatable, but again it would certainly help make the site more easily browsed for real people.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Jarno & Lynn,

Thank you both for taking the time to respond !

Yes i agree i think this logical structure is best since helps search engines AND the users better understand the content since its associated with other immediately related content too both in terms of semantic relationship & close architectural proximity.  This is also reinforced by good internal linking provided by breadcrumbs (which do help contribute to rankings in part since contributes to setting relevance of the pages content and its context).

I think in the case of a single item of content needing to be in more than one folder then maybe in that kind of scenario its better to have the content page 'off the root' and canonicalised to avoid duplicate content issues from displaying it in the 2 different category folders it will also be displayed in. Then so long as you have breadcrumbs (which from Lynns comments looks like you can edit/customise for the 2 different paths) you still benefit from the logical hierarchy and internal linking beneficial for both users and engines.

Although i must confess since i'm not that technical i don't know this for a fact and welcome the view of others to clarify/confirm.  So does having the canonicalised page off the root stop engines seeing the silo structure therby defeating the purpose of this suggested solution OR would they still see the other page instances & associate it with the path but just not penalise it for being duplicate (since the page 'off the root' is the canonical version) hence is a good solution ??

All Best

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Jarno & Lynn,

Thank you both for taking the time to respond !

Yes i agree i think this logical structure is best since helps search engines AND the users better understand the content since its associated with other immediately related content too both in terms of semantic relationship & close architectural proximity.  This is also reinforced by good internal linking provided by breadcrumbs (which do help contribute to rankings in part since contributes to setting relevance of the pages content and its context).

I think in the case of a single item of content needing to be in more than one folder then maybe in that kind of scenario its better to have the content page 'off the root' and canonicalised to avoid duplicate content issues from displaying it in the 2 different category folders it will also be displayed in. Then so long as you have breadcrumbs (which from Lynns comments looks like you can edit/customise for the 2 different paths) you still benefit from the logical hierarchy and internal linking beneficial for both users and engines.

Although i must confess since i'm not that technical i don't know this for a fact and welcome the view of others to clarify/confirm.  So does having the canonicalised page off the root stop engines seeing the silo structure therby defeating the purpose of this suggested solution OR would they still see the other page instances & associate it with the path but just not penalise it for being duplicate (since the page 'off the root' is the canonical version) hence is a good solution ??

All Best

Dan

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

Just to confirm something that came to mind, is this for an ecom site with the potential to have products in multiple categories? If this is the case it is quite common to canonical the individual product pages to the root (or Everett Sizemore recommends to a standard /product/ or similar url which is also good for analytics filtering, check this video: http://moz.com/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues). If this is the case then depending on your cms it can be tricky to get the breadcrumbs to be created when people are directly hitting the single product page from a social share or other direct link.

It is possible though! I have had success with custom breadcrumb coding in Magento where if the single product page is directly accessed the breadcrumb will be created based on the products 'main category' and this has worked well in some situations. Again depends if you are talking ecommerce and which cms system you are using as to how tricky it will be.

[Dan-Lawrence]

HI Lynn

In this particular case it is not actually although thats great info thanks very much for sharing, Everett is great i always refer to his posts/advice whenever i have an ecommerce project.

In this case my client i'm talking about is a music education establishment with many different courses and the site is in Wordpress, any ideas if possible to edit breadcrumbs in wordpress ?

Cheers

Dan

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan,

Well that will probably make it easier actually...

If you are using the Yoast plugin then it can produce breadrumbs which are pretty flexible and you can also manually add canonicals for individual pages. In that case I would think just set up the breadcrumbs as you like and if it makes sense choose a main category for any pages in multiple categories and canonical to the main one. Test to confirm, but I would think you might be able to do it without getting your hands into the code at all! The canonical tags themselves shouldn't effect the breadcrumbs in any way, so you should be good to go.