Breadcrumbs and crawling budget for product URLs "within collection"

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Topic summary

Core Issue:
SEO agencies frequently request removal of collection-specific product URLs (e.g., /collections/your-collection/products/your-product) in favor of canonical product URLs (/products/your-product), citing crawl budget concerns. This creates a secondary problem: breadcrumbs can no longer dynamically show the referring collection, potentially displaying incorrect paths when products belong to multiple collections.

Expert Response:

  • Having only one URL per page is best practice, so avoiding collection-aware product URLs is recommended
  • Shopify’s OS 2.0 themes (2021+) already addressed this issue; a code fix exists for older themes
  • The primary concern is index hygiene, not crawl budget—simplifying URL structure helps search engines process content more efficiently

Breadcrumb Solution:
Breadcrumbs don’t need to match the referring collection. Instead, assign each product a “main” collection and use that consistently in breadcrumbs to maintain internal linking benefits.

Summarized with AI on November 1. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Hello,

we are regularly asked by SEO agencies of our customers to remove the product URLs within collections. Like “yourshop.com/collections/your-collection/products/your-product” to have only the canonical product URLs like “yourshop.com/products/your-product”. According to different SEO specialists its to save crawling budget. The next subject we have after that is that the breadcrumbs are not showing the referring collection anymore due to missing collection in the URL. We are usually fixing one collection per product that we show in the breadcrumb to increase the internal linking but the breadcrumbs could also be incorrect when the product is in several collections. So first question: is the duplication of the URLs really an issue that takes away crawling budget or is this just something they are saying? And the second question is, what is the best practice for breadcrumbs when I don’t know the referring collection, should I still add them to have more internal linking to the collections?

Thank you in advance!

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Re: URL form, it’s a best practice to only have one URL per page, so yes, I’d recommend not having collection-aware product URLs. And for the record, I’m pretty sure Shopify’s OS2.0 themes fixed this issue in 2021, but I realize lots of people use other themes. The first section of this article touches on the code fix for this: https://gofishdigital.com/blog/how-to-fix-shopify-duplicate-content/

It’s not so much a crawl budget issue as it is an index hygiene issue. It just makes the search engines’ lives simpler to not have to sift through all those non-canonical product URLs.

The breadcrumb on the product page does not have to match the referring collection. It’s fine for it to just be the “main” collection of that product (you get to define “main” in this scenario).

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