Different breadcrumbs for each productpage

[AMAGARD]

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 xyz

When you visit the product URL directly, the breadcrumb looks like this (also in the source code):
Home > Bigbag Sandpit sand type xyz

Looks 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!

[Roman-Delcarmen]

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

[AMAGARD]

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

[Roman-Delcarmen]

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

[Everett]

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.

[AMAGARD]

Thanks for your answer! I will discuss it with our developer. But good to know it isn't a huge problem regarding SEO.