By Elmer on November 19, 2009

Breadcrumbs are navigational aids placed on top of the body content of a web page. Their subtle presence allows visitors to quickly refer to the links that come with breadcrumbs to bail them back to the homepage, or parent category of the current page. In terms of user experience, it’s a good guide as it’s prominently placed, yet not too obtrusive so as to steal someone’s attention.

For search engines, breadcrumbs provide a quick navigation guide on where to go after done crawling one page. Other links may exist within the page such as navigation menu or footer links. But from the standpoint of the current page being crawled, breadcrumb navigation offers the best structured way of crawling pages from top to bottom content organization without leaving any page unattended.

Google has introduced displaying navigation structure on search results instead of just the URL of the search results page (see sample image below). Now, I have a feeling that a navigation structure like breadcrumbs helps produce this more informational search results display.

From a typical search result like this one,

It is now possible for Google to display breadcrumbs style navigation on search result like this one,

I think that even if our sites don’t have this type of navigation, it may still be possible to get such results. What’s important is that we properly structure our website. It can be done through proper grouping of main contents, clearly defining relationships between main sections and how main sections spread out into individual pages. I also think that this new feature will be more helpful for sites that have large amount of organized content. Examples include e-commerce sites, auction sites and other content-rich websites.

While I don’t see a direct link between breadcrumbs navigation and Google’s new search result display feature, adding breadcrumbs might help. Regardless if this new feature is offered or not, to me breadcrumbs navigation looks like almost a requirement in building web pages.

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