Aug 24
Google Displaying Breadcrumb Navigation in SERP Snippets
You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?
A couple of bloggers have reported seeing breadcrumb trails in Google Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) lately, meaning they may be testing the inclusion of breadcrumb navigation as part of site snippets.
Breadcrumb navigation shows the user’s path in relation to their current location. It’s the little trail of keywords you often see at the top of the page, below the main header image telling you what section of a site you are on. There’s a good explanation here.
Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped blogged about seeing breadcrumbs in Google SERPs as far back as July. Leo Fogarty has seen a couple of results on closely related search queries. Now Chris Crum of Web Pro News reports a few random instances of breadcrumb SERP usage.
Google have always encouraged webmasters to use breadcrumb navigation for usability purposes and now they’re apparently going to reward webmasters who take their advice by including breadcrumbs within their site snippet.
Here’s a screengrab of how breadcrumbs look in the Google SERPs for the search query “car hire Spain”:
As you can see, the keywords in the breadcrumbs that match the search query are bolded, meaning that they are included in the algorithmic ranking factors for that query. So potentially, the use of breadcrumb navigation as an SEO tactic has just become a whole lot more important.
A check of the pages displaying the breadcrumbs in their snippets confirms the use of breadcrumb navigation and the exact breadcrumb trail included in the snippet e.g. http://www.auto-europe.co.uk/car-hire/Spain.cfm.
I personally haven’t seen any crumbed SERPs but it’s apparently quite rare so far, with the testing possibly limited to UK sites.
Have you seen any? Please let us know via the comments below.
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August 25th, 2009 at 1:20 am
Been seeing these for a couple of weeks now, though in a slightly different format.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:23 am
Great post Kalena, I’ve also seen a couple of sites showing breadcrumbs above the snippet text as well (”london used cars” shows a couple of sites for me, for example). Checked this on another IP address (same location) and couldn’t see them for the same search query so it may be a little hit and miss at the moment.
Yet another great reason to recommend breadcrumb nav :)
August 28th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
For example see two websites revealing breadcrumbs exceed snippet text (ondon use carsshows two websites to me, such as) No matter what it is, . In another IP address (the same position) On check there aren’t this and couldn.
August 30th, 2009 at 12:26 am
hiii can u explain me what is breadcrumb??
August 31st, 2009 at 11:33 pm
This breadcrumb matters an IP Address? Can breadcrumbs helps SEO? I am looking forward for the reply thanks for this post.
September 12th, 2009 at 12:48 am
[...] worth noting that Google has recently been experimenting with Breadcrumb navigation in their SERPs [...]