What are Breadcrumbs and Their Role in SEO?

  • December 11, 2018
  • SEO
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Breadcrumbs constitute an essential part of a high-quality website. They act as navigational aids that detect your position in a given website and helps Google to identify how the site is structured. It has a wide range of advantages, but before delving into the technicalities, you need to understand what are breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumbs- Overview

Breadcrumbs are the links that allow your web users to track and determine the path that led them to arrive in their present page from the homepage of a website. They are displayed at the top of the web page and represent the navigation framework of a website.

They are specific helpful pointers that add context to the innermost pages within the website structure and reduce several degrading factors that can hamper the user experience of a website.

Type of Breadcrumbs

There are different types of breadcrumbs, the three most common ones are:

1. Hierarchy-Based Breadcrumbs

This is the most common type of Breadcrumbs that signals the user where they are located in a site structure and how many back-steps they need to take to return on the homepage.

For example:

Home > Blog > Category > Post Name

2. Hierarchy Based Breadcrumbs

Attribute-based breadcrumbs are prevalent on e-commerce websites. They get triggered when a user performs a search. Breadcrumb path consists of product attributes.

For example:

Home > Product category > Gender > Size > Color

3. History-Based Breadcrumbs

History-based breadcrumbs are not common like the other part. They get triggered to find out what the user has been doing on a website. They are counted as an alternative to the internet history bar.

For example:

Home > Old page > Previous page> Current page

When are Breadcrumbs used?

Breadcrumbs are ideal for large-sized ecommerce websites that have a hierarchical arrangement of ‘n’ number of pages. For websites with single pages, breadcrumbs are not prescribed for usage since they will be no logic involved in grouping pages

Before enabling breadcrumb navigation, you need to construct a sitemap. It is a diagrammatic representation of the navigation architecture of the website.

But a critical question us whether breadcrumbs improve the navigation ability of the user between various categories on a website.

The breadcrumb navigation is an extra functionality, and it plays no role in subverting the usefulness of the primary navigation menus. They are more like a convenience feature that helps them to find their exact location within the site and assist them in browsing through the website as ease, just like a secondary navigation scheme.

Key Functions of Breadcrumbs

  • Breadcrumbs are generally duplicated to preserve time while building navigation.
  • Import and export breadcrumbs facilitate single operations, features and Ctools bulk export.
  • The contexts can be loaded from URL structure and used as breadcrumb path or title.
  • Breadcrumbs have a usable interface, and their titles are easily translatable.
  • You can enable and disable breadcrumbs for your website from the back-end.

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