Breadcrumbs for products under multiple categories

I am creating breadcrumbs for my products that can be found in multiple categories. This is NOT a duplicate content issue for me since I don't display the category name in the URL. My problem/concern is that depending on which category the product was found on, the breadcrumbs would change. (I would achieve this by using http refferer.) Would this confuse Google spiders in anyway or take any authority away from the page?

It seems like it would be a problem since the spiders are crawling the site and seeing the same pages breadcrumbs changing so frequently. Especially since I rewrote these product pages and want them to look static.

Would love to here your thoughts/theory's on this subject.
Thanks

I cant see this being an issue aslong as the urls are the same and do not change in the slightest. Your urls pointing to the page is what matters.

Aslong as the url page destination is the same the same page is not being indexed under two seperate urls.

So you shouldn't have an issue.

Don't use referer to build your bread crumbs. What if someone links to your site? That would probably do bad things.

Well if that issue comes up, i will just load the default category. My main concern was scaring the search engines in someway.

Thank for the help

so if someone links to one of your inner pages, you're going to redirect visitors to an upper category page?

If you are doing what Galen says it probley wont do you any favors as people who will click the link will want that inner page, not the category page and just simply click away as they will precive that the page has moved or deleted, and wont be bothed to look for it.

What I do is set the type/category in a DB varaible and then call it in when the product is displayed. This way the user gets the page they want and it's seo friendly.

If you are re-directing the SE's might precvie you as cloaking - and penalize you, or get re-directed aswell (depends how you set it up and thus not index your inner pages.). This might be you problem. Remember SE want to see how your users see the page if the user gets re-directed then surly they will want to be re-direct aswell, right.

I don't think Galen is advising a redirect, quite the opposite in fact. He's simply pointing out using 'http referrer' to build breadcrumbs is a bad idea.

To the OP, I can see the "http referer" idea falling over in quite a few ways. Links from other websites, links from search engine result, or even the user clicking up the breadcrumb trail.

In this case where there are multiple categories, it might be an idea to think about listing the categories the product can be found in, similar to tags or categories in a blog post:

Product Name
Listed under: cat. one, cat. four and cat. nine

yes the page will still be exactly the same if they found the page from a search engine or whatever. The only thing that will change is the breadcrumbs. Instead of showing the category that the product came from in the breadcrumbs, it would show the default category.

HI
justsearchltd no sorry if i was unclear.



This is what i was refferring to when i was talking about Galen. I didn't mean to imply thats what he would do or advise.

Applogises Galen if I got your point mixed up not my attention.

Good catch.