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September 17, 2014

Magento SEO Breadcrumbs

Magento Breadcrumbs are a bit to be desired, when it comes to consistency and SEO purposes. Product breadcrumbs would shift to whatever the latest category they were added to. So if a product goes on sale in a special “sale” category, then the breadcrumb would be rebuilt and shown on the product page.

This had a negative effect on SEO, in that the products where showing up in sales or even newsletter categories.

We found a post here at StackOverflow and an answer by “Fiasco Labs” got us started on the right path.

The code dropped us down a category, but we still had products that were nested two categories deep. With a few tweaks, we fixed the breadcrumbs for a product to use the very first category it was tagged with. So super long breadcrumbs like “home->newsletter->sales->machines->Super Duper Machine” are now just “home->Big Machines->Super Duper Machine”. As long as the root category is not removed, it should always present a static breadcrumb for subsequent crawls by search engines.

Code:

 
protected function _toHtml() {             
 
   $cat_id = "";
 
   if (Mage::registry('current_product')) {
      $product_id = Mage::registry('current_product')->getId();
      $obj = Mage::getModel('catalog/product');
      $_product = $obj->load($product_id); // Enter your Product Id in $product_id
      if ($product_id) {
         $categoryIds = $_product->getCategoryIds();
         $cat_id = $categoryIds[0];
      }
 
      $category = Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->load($cat_id);
      $cat_name = $category->getName();
      $cat_url =  $this->getBaseUrl().$category->getUrlPath();
   }
 
   if (is_array($this->_crumbs)) {
      reset($this->_crumbs);
      $this->_crumbs[key($this->_crumbs)]['first'] = true;
      end($this->_crumbs);
      $this->_crumbs[key($this->_crumbs)]['last'] = true;
   }
 
   if($cat_id) {
	//go through and all cats we don't want.
      foreach($this->_crumbs as $key=>$value){
        if(strpos($key, 'category')!==false):
            unset($this->_crumbs[$key]);
        endif;
      }
      $this->_crumbs['category'.$cat_id] = array('label'=>$cat_name, 'title'=>'', 'link'=>	$cat_url,'first'=>'','last'=>'','readonly'=>'');
      ksort($this->_crumbs);
 
      $home = $this->_crumbs['home'];
      unset($this->_crumbs['home']);
      array_unshift($this->_crumbs,$home);
   }
 
   $this->assign('crumbs', $this->_crumbs);
   return parent::_toHtml();
}

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