Being an SEO professional comes with the important task of keeping an ear close to the ground for interesting news from search engines such as Google, but it is also a well known fact that Google doesn’t always want you to know what they are getting up to.
Last night a fellow SEO professional managed to get a screenshot of yet another “Google Test”
Below is a screenshot taken by Rob Hammond of Google including breadcrumbs in some random search results.
This is very interesting to any SEO professional because it could mean that Google are about to throw a heavy weight on a site using breadcrumbs as part of their navigational structure, making them an important part of on page optimisation and overall website structure.
If you are unsure of what breadcrumbs are on a website then let me try and clear this up for you now before we continue on with this article.
Breadcrumbs are basically a “you are here” way of displaying a website’s navigation, making it easier for browsers to navigate back to previous pages. For example: if you visited Kaplang.com and navigated from the home page to the page with more info about logo design it would create the following breadcrumb –
Kaplang Home > Graphic Design > Logo Design
If you then decided to contact Kaplang.com from here via their contact form you would get the following breadcrumb –
Kaplang Home > Graphic Design > Logo Design > Contact
You are in a way leaving a breadcrumb trail of where you have been and where you currently are on the website.
It does appear that Google are only testing breadcrumbs in search results at this time but Google have always pushed the importance of a websites structure and this could be a future addition to the checklist of on page optimisation.
Please tell us if using breadcrumbs on your website is something that you already do by commenting on this post and sharing your views.
About The Author:
 Michelle Kirkbride | Michelle Kirkbride is a web developer, she currently lives in Yorkshire, UK with her two beautiful children and loving partner. She spends far too much time at her computer and is currently addicted to her work. |
I wouldn’t say the breadcrumbs could weigh so much for a page rank. It is of course a very nice thing to have on your website, to help your visitors find their way around quicker. Those links are also good in SEO because they show any search engine how pages are interrrelated and provides good links from a page to the other. But from here to saying that it could weigh in the SEO it’s a long way to go.