Hello, I've currently implemented a terrible attempt at breadcrumb navigation. It looks rubbish and basically consists of "Home > Category > Subcategory > Current Page" Have a look here for an example: http://www.coffeesh0p.com/entheogens/kratom/krypton_kratom_mitragyna_speciosa_50x_extract_3g-kr004/ So, I was thinking of changing this to look and function a lot better, but I was wondering about the impact this might have on my SEO efforts. I plan on turning each item in the navigation list into an actual html list (.syled to look awesome, but that's not important). Under each item, I also intend to have another list containing all the subcategories found for each item which is invisible until you mouse over the item in question. It will look and function a lot like this: http://phoenity.com/newtedge/horizontal_nav/ (although that doesn't seem to work in IE7). The actual HTML list will be very simple and will look a lot like the following: <ul class="nav"> <li><strong>a navigation item</strong> <ul> <li>a navigation list item</li> <li>...</li> <li>...</li> <li>...</li> </ul> </li> <li><strong>a navigation item</strong> <ul> <li>another navigation list item</li> <li>...</li> <li>...</li> <li>...</li> </ul> </li> <li>...</li> ... </ul> HTML: So, I was wondering, would having a massive list of links above the content be worse in terms of SEO, compared to the simple ">" delimited string I have now? Also, for similar deep subcategories, the majority of the code for the new navigation will be the same. Will these pages be more likely to trigger any kind of duplicate content penalty? Thanks in advance. Rep awarded for well thought out replies.
No one has anything valuable to say? I remember a time when this place wasn't filled with "how do I get more traffic" and "wut r link building?" posts; a time when decent SEOs had something worthwhile to offer to the conversation.
lol, that must have been some time ago depends what you mean by massive I would think, but no I wouldnt worry about dupe filters etc as long as theres enough content below. because of the CSS we have our main site nav and r/h column nav and boilerplate text above the content and it isnt hurting us in anyway. I also see well ranking sites like this, and a lot worse, all the time. I'd say try it, it'll probably be alright, just back up the old site ready for a swift reversal should anything go wrong
I really like breadcrumbing, however if you have more than 4 levels, you might want to use ellipsis ... to denote there are more categories in between. Each specific page is pointing to a more generic topic and also pointing back to homepage, makes navigation easy and also defines relations between pages.