Breadcrumbs In SEO

October 3, 2008

If you have an E-commerce website then one thing that you usually see on all the best websites is a breadcrumb trail. A breadcrumb trail is? textual navigation that visually shows how you got to the page you are reading.

Breadcrumbs serve two purposes. Firstly they are used as a guide by users, many people may only want to go back to the category level, but they may not have got to the product through the category e.g. latest offer link. breadcrumbs show structure and make a user familiar with were they are in the site and give easy and clear links on how to go back up the structure. Some websites that don’t currently use this method includes Amazon. I find it quite confusing having to go through the menu every time i want to go to the category level from a product. It makes a users experience that little more of a struggle which is something a website should not be doing.

Secondly, the breadcrumbs can be used for SEO purposes. Because the breadcrumbs are text based then the anchor text is read by Google. If you have an optimised site to the point that the keywords are your categories then google will always use the anchor text and place more relevance to that keyword to that page.

Gary
Senior SEO Programmer

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4 Comments

  1. This is an excellent point, I’d just like to ask the following question:-

    Would you recommend keeping both the breadcrumb AND the menu links to the category pages the same, or would you use different anchor text for each?

    Comment by SC October 3, 2008 @ 6:36 pm

  2. Why doesn’t google analytics have this?

    Comment by JG October 6, 2008 @ 9:03 am

  3. Hi SC, I would keep them both the same, if you start to change the anchor text on breadcrumb links then it would be confusing for the user. For example, if you click on a category that says SEO, once you?re on that page or on a product page within that category then the whole point of breadcrumbs is to show how you got to where you are, if your breadcrumbs show a different path then they are not serving their purpose.

    Comment by GaryDouglas October 7, 2008 @ 10:45 am

  4. So are you saying just by having bread crumb links this will help my seo by giving google more text links with keywords.

    I am thinking of adding them to my site http://www.claritaslux.com I have russian language software the bread crumb would be Learn russian > Russian words > Russian days of the month.

    Because I would have all these “russian” words in the link that would help google?
    I am trying to redo my site navigation and I am debating adding this feature.
    Mark

    Comment by mark October 24, 2008 @ 10:31 am

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