Google Breadcrumbs Anyone?

Google Breadcrumbs Anyone?
By Vickie Scanlon

Google Breadcrumbs? What in the world are Google breadcrumbs? And, how are they associated with Google.

In this instance, this has nothing to do with bread, but a different method in which Google is presenting your web pages to the global network.

So, what does that mean to webmasters? It means that you can see more of your links on the search result pages.

The best way in which you can get your breadcrumb URLs to show up in Google is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site's hierarchy. Which means, your navigation and sitemap is becoming more important.

There are three types of Google breadcrumbs that Google have been using: by path, location, and attribute. Let me give you a quick explanation.


Types of Google Breadcrumbs

Path breadcrumbs-Is the path the user took to arrive at a page.

Location breadcrumbs - show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. (Currently, this type of breadcrumb I am seeing in my own search on Google).

Attribute breadcrumbs - Gives information that categorizes the current page.

Obviously Google is using location breadcrumbs. However, this new SEO technique is only in the beginning stages for Google (noticed that Yahoo is using it as well). This new technique can give you, the webmaster/blogger, greater exposure for your pages. So, my advise is to keep "breadcrumbs" in the back of their mind when you are building your site. Why? Though, this is my opinion-it's great for the users, webmasters, and it makes the search engines all that more useful to the users.

And for the webmaster with SEO on their mind-it means that each link can be more or less valuable based on the relationship with and context to information found behind other links.

Though there is some confusion among webmasters/bloggers alike, as to what delimiter to use: /, >, ???, or | , I've seen my breadcrumbs showing up with /. Translated don't change anything until you know a change is needed in this regard.