More SEO Problems with CMS (Content Management Systems)

I was reading a fantastic article from SEOMoz (which isn't suprising) about SEO considerations for CMS systems.

The two most common problems I see with CMS systems that have not been mentioned (or I didn't read all the comments closely enough) are:

1) Breadcrumb navigation based on the path the user took to get to the page. So in the event that you have a product that exists in multiple categories, make sure that the URL pointing to the product is unique (don't have multiple URLs for the same product based on the category names). This will require that the breadcrumb navigation is generated using cookies which means that the engines will only see the default breadcrumb navigation (make sure its the most important category of your site).

Example:

You sell Dresses. You have Prom Dresses and Formal Dresses category. A particular dress, called the Fishkin style dress, exists in both categories. The breadcrumb navigation changes with respect to which path I took to get to the Fishkin dress. It could be

Dress Shop -> Prom Dresses -> Fishkin Dress or it could be
Dress Shop -> Formal Dresses -> Fishkin Dress

Either one could exist on the page depending on what the user path to the page was. This determination should be made using cookies in order to ensure accuaracy for the user. For search engines that don't use cookies, you will need to have a default breadcrumb (or block it entirely by putting it in javascript but that takes away valuable link connectivity). The default breadcrumb in this case should be based on whether Formal Dresses or Prom Dresses are more important to the business model because you can only show the search engines one of em. If you don't use cookies to generate the breadcrumb, the search engines will find a different breadcrumb everytime they spider the page from a different category and this can lead to inconsistent internal link connectivity which can adversley affect rankings.

2) Pagination where there are multiple pages and page one is not consistent. So in the Dress example, if you click on Promo Dresses, there may be 10 pages of promo dresses. If I click on page 2, and then navigate back to page 1 using the menu of page numbers that typically is put at the bottom of pages like this, more often than not, the CMS system generates a new URL for Page 1 which thereby causes a potential duplicate content issue and also splits PR between the two pages.

The pagination issue is less of a concern for the most part than the breadcrumb navigation issue. And the breadcrumb issue is most problematic when it generates seperate URLs for the same product. So in the first example, the following URLs would be generated by a CMS with this issue:

www.dressdomain.com/prom-dresses/fishkin-dress.html
www.dressdomain.com/formal-dresses/fishkin-dress.html

This obviously is a duplicate content issue. So when evaluting any CMS platform, pay special attention to the breadcrumb navigation. The devil is in the details with CMS systems.