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Regarding breadcrumbs, will changing products default categories affect SEO?


alwayspaws

Question

Will changing products default categories affect SEO?

The breadcrumb paths are wrong so I will need to edit all my products' default categories. For example:

In a tee shirt product I have to edit the product by going to associations and scroll to the bottom to change DEFAULT CATEGORY from Dog Clothes to Dog Tee Shirts.

The background on this:

My breadcrumbs path doesn’t show the subcategory I clicked on when I arrive on the product page. I click main category “Dog Clothes” and click subcategory “Dog Tee Shirts”. Then I click the tee shirt product and I get this breadcrumb path:

Home> Dog Clothes>Funny Dog Tee Shirt with 3 dog obedience commands

The path should be: Home> Dog Clothes> Dog Tee Shirts> Funny Dog Tee Shirt with 3 dog obedience commands

How do I fix this, please?

Jonny answered:

The breadcrumb of a product is always the path of the product’s default category.

The default category of all your products in “Dog Tee Shirts” category is “Dog Clothes”, not “Dog Tee Shirts”. You have to edit them to change their “Default category” to “Dog Tee Shirts” to make their breadcrumbs be “Home> Dog Clothes> Dog Tee Shirts”.

If it will affect whatever SEO I may have, should I leave them alone? It will make the UX more difficult and I do not like this.

0_1516973839527_dog clothes - dog tee shirts subcategory - click on one tee shirt - no breadcrumb from dog tee shirts subcategory.jpg

Here is where to fix this:

0_1516973870838_where to edit update fix breadcrumb paths for a product.jpg

Thanks, Stephanie

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Since then your site is live? If it's a few months, it will be not such trouble if you change some of your categories path. Better do it now than watching it like that for years, because your positioning in search results will only improve from now on and it could be really late after some time. There is 301 redirect you could use to avoid loosing any ranking but I think @lesley is the man to explain it better.

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@alwayspaws Hi Stephanie. I always first click on the subcategory into which the product is supposed to go. Then I click the next higher level up to the start category. I deactivate the start category briefly and activate it again immediately. Then the category below automatically changes to the one I clicked first.

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@alwayspaws

OK, is there a way I can export just my URLS? It will be a lot easier if it works right (lol). I got that idea from the link I pasted above.

try "Screaming Frog SEO Spider", it's free for crawling (and exporting) up to 500 URLs at a time https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/general/

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@mockob said in Regarding breadcrumbs, will changing products default categories affect SEO?:

I think in ps 1.5 if I change the associated product category from the product page it automatically adds 301. But I'm not sure how it is on thirty bees, and I'm not able to check it because I don't have access to pc at the moment.

I'm going to try this now. Wish me luck! :)

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Thank you @Ulrich I installed and tried this app on my Mac. Contacted them about how to crawl just one category.

They said "Due to your set-up (lack of a trailing slash on the subfolder), you'll need to use the include, but that's only available in the paid version. :-)"

Any other suggestions, please? In the meantime, I'll test @MockoB's suggestion.

0_1517489583420_Screaming Frog first crawl - 2018-02-01 at 7.36.40 AM.jpg

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@alwayspaws you can export your urls from the Google Search Console, it's got every indexed page there, just go onto the indexed page section and download them. Screaming Frog is a fantastic tool but it's really more suited in that scenario to downloading competitor urls, for your own the search console is the best bet.

I know you can use the sitemap as well but the Search Console is better as it shows you what's actually indexed, rather than just submitted.

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