ECommerce Site Breadcrumbs Best Practice
-
I'm working on an Ecom website and I was wondering -
For breadcrumbs - is there an SEO and/or UEx preference when it comes to taking them back to the homepage?
I have the option of going CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY > SUB CATEGORY
or
HOME > CATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY > SUBCATEGORY
Each example is hyperlinked except for the lowest level.
Thanks
-
Thanks a lot Marcin. This totally confirmed what I was thinking and I appreciate the source links.
-
I believe that in terms of UX, breadcrumbs should lead back to the home page. It's simply more convenient for users.
It is a navigation trail after all, and you should not force users to think (a.k.a. Don't Make Me Think). It would make no sense to allow them to navigate up the tree, but force them to click the logo to return to the homepage.
There are some excellent articles concerning breadcrumb usability patterns. Please refer for example to this article from Smashing Magazine.
Jakob Nielsen, a renowned UX expert, also seems to support this idea on his site.
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
-
SEO Rankings Ebbs and Flows on Ecommerce Site - Normal?
Hey everyone, I should start by saying I'm very new to SEO (I'm actually just a copywriter that's taken on this role at an agency), so I apologize if I'm using some common terms incorrectly or if there's a lack of information. I've been optimizing my first ecommerce website (clothing company), and things were going very well last year. Strong surges in organic traffic, peaking in the summer. There was a drop before the holidays when the client dumped a ton of new product pages that weren't optimized. After optimizing the pages, the traffic went back up to its summer levels. Now, there's about a 10% drop in organic traffic since earlier this year, and a loss of just over 20% of keywords the site was originally ranking for. There's no sharp drop in the Analytics, but a steady decline. To give a better idea, the site was ranking for 5,270 keywords in February; it's dropped to 3,772 keywords in April. According to SEMRush, almost all the dropped keywords are the lower volume ones, maybe indicating long tail keywords? I'm really not sure what the cause of the drop is, as I've been following (I think) best on-page practices, which seems to have yielded results last year. One thing I should mention is the client has a unique product page for each variant of one product (so the same shirt will have 10 of the same pages, the only difference being the colour). Could Google be penalizing the site for duplicate content? It was fine last year though with that same site structure; I'm not sure how long it would take for Google to penalize a site for that. Sorry for the wall of text. I'd really appreciate any insight into this. Thanks Moz community!
On-Page Optimization | | EdenPrez3 -
Do i have to optimize all pages on ecommerce site which is currently 4028 give or take
Hello, do i have to optimize all pages on ecommerce site, as its a lot of pages to developed unique content for my plan at the moment is to start from top down, I have completed top home, featured products etc i have also started on individual team shops my content inst unique to each page more the same and just changing the team name and keyword i was planning on doing that in the blog area of the site and just making the top categories and sub categories. and maybe in time start on the products. I can do all categories in about two months but to complete products would take like 2 years I don't feel that is productive and most would be changed or out of stock by then please take a look at my site and tell me what you think ? sportingdesires.com Kindest Regards, Stephen Kewn
On-Page Optimization | | sportingdesires0 -
Moving Site from HTTP to HTTPS
Hi, So the news is that Google has started giving more importance to sites with HTTPS i.e. it is now a new ranking signal. It says that as of now it affects fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high quality content but it may decide to strengthen it as they would like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web. In that case, what should we do? Switching from http:// to https:// means change in urls and low traffic. How to cope with it? Do we have to implement 'n' number of redirects? Regards,
On-Page Optimization | | IM_Learner3 -
Best SEO Extension/Plugin for NOPCommerce Site?
Hi I am working for a client who is using NOPCommerce. It doesn't look like they have a SEO Plugin in - although you can add meta descriptions to Products - which works fine, the Product categories have SEO components too but do not seem to work and all 'other' content /CMS pages have no SEO components whatsoever. Does anyone know of a plugin which would resolve this? (PS never used NOPCommerce before!)
On-Page Optimization | | AllieMc0 -
Do https sites rank as well as http sites?
2 Questions: Question 1 - We currently have our entire site running on https (the http pages 301-redirect to the https versions). Assuming that the https pages load as quickly as the http versions, is it a problem that the entire site is https? The only official answer I've been able to find is this 2011 video where Matt Cutts basically says "I don't know" - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M Question 2 - Is there any problem with having half our site running on https only (with the http pages redirected), and the other half (our blog) running on http only (with all https blog pages redirected to the http versions)? Thanks in advance for any input! Justin
On-Page Optimization | | JustinClark0 -
Site Maps / Robots.txt etc
Hi everyone I have setup a site map using a Wordpress pluggin: http://lockcity.co.uk/site-map/ Can you please tell me if this is sufficient for the search engines? I am trying to understand the difference between this and having a robots.txt - or do I need both? Many thanks, Abi
On-Page Optimization | | LockCity0 -
Is this type of Internal Linking Bad or Good for my Site????
A while back we were schooled on "Link Silos" a reputable SEO source.... and one suggestion was to create links from our product pages (bottom of link silo), back up to it's higher category page. So for example... Home > Tools > Hair Dryers > "Product" On the subject product... we chose to link back to "Hair Dryers" and then "Andis" (that product's brand page. You can see this at the below product page. We added the links below "Related Categories" in the product description. http://www.beautystoponline.com/Andis-Colorwaves-Tourmaline-Hair-Dryer-Blue-Green-p/an1dry0295.htm We are now thinking this may be just too much as there is already a "bread crumb" trail at the top of the product page. These are in essence links back up to higher categories. Any input on these types of links would be appreciated.. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | BeautyStop1 -
Best article about internal linking structure?
Hi! Could you please recommend me a good and deep article about best practises in internal linking structure? I need to rethink the structure of a big site (lucky me it's very hierarchical) and I would like to have a look at some great articles about this to consolidate some ideas and have some new ones. I've read some but I would like some recommendations 🙂 Some articles about information architecture would be appreciated as well! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | jorgediaz0