SEO Breadcrumbs sitemaps

[Moxyer]

Hey there,

ive had this online shop for some years now using Opencart as an ecommerce software and i was wondering a bit about sitemaps and breadcrumbs.

In the old sitemap there was always included links with categories in them like site.com/category1/product1.html, but updating the software, the product category is not included at all but goes directly to site.com/product1.html

My question is, would this hurt my SEO alot if the category name would be completely gone? It would be sad if many years of work would vanish because of some mistake like that.. I get that Breadcrumbs is "easier" on the eyes on google, but would it hurt it in this instance, where the category names were also used in the old sitemap?

Any help would be really appreciated!

Best regards,
Mox

[Neel Patel]

Hey there,

ive had this online shop for some years now using Opencart as an ecommerce software and i was wondering a bit about sitemaps and breadcrumbs.

In the old sitemap there was always included links with categories in them like site.com/category1/product1.html, but updating the software, the product category is not included at all but goes directly to site.com/product1.html

My question is, would this hurt my SEO alot if the category name would be completely gone? It would be sad if many years of work would vanish because of some mistake like that.. I get that Breadcrumbs is "easier" on the eyes on google, but would it hurt it in this instance, where the category names were also used in the old sitemap?

Any help would be really appreciated!

Best regards,
Mox

Yes, it will hurt your SEO.  All the work you did on site.com/category1/product1.html will not help you anymore. And because of category1 is removed you will get so many 404 errors. all the backlinks will b useless. so either you can remove them or you can redirect them.

I hope this helps you.

[mammasseo]

Sitemaps are not required at all and if you dont use them or miss out some URL's it wont effect your rankings.

Sitemaps can help speed things up a little but not always, Most of the time they are good for letting google know of pages that cant be navigated to via internal links. So lets assume you have a search facility and that displays dynamic pages which cant be got to any other way, these pages are perfect for sitemaps because without them google may never find them.

Many people tend to think a sitemap is a must to their SEO efforts, I am afraid its just not the case, many of my sites I dont post one and they rank just fine.

Think of a sitemap as generating links to the whole of your site so google can follow these links to crawl them, exactly the same can be done via your site structure or build some external links to your pages.

[neelseofast]

Hey there,

ive had this online shop for some years now using Opencart as an ecommerce software and i was wondering a bit about sitemaps and breadcrumbs.

In the old sitemap there was always included links with categories in them like site.com/category1/product1.html, but updating the software, the product category is not included at all but goes directly to site.com/product1.html

My question is, would this hurt my SEO alot if the category name would be completely gone? It would be sad if many years of work would vanish because of some mistake like that.. I get that Breadcrumbs is "easier" on the eyes on google, but would it hurt it in this instance, where the category names were also used in the old sitemap?

Any help would be really appreciated!

Best regards,
Mox

Definitely, it will hurt SEO.