Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool for Breadcrumbs

Many websites neglect to use breadcrumb navigation, despite it being highly useful,according to usability experts.

Even on relatively small sites, breadcrumbs can help a user orient themselves in the site’s hierarchy, and provide them with related pages that they might wish to visit.

For this reason, Google began encouraging webmasters to sue this data to display in rich snippets as additional links beneath the hyperlinked page name.

Simply from a statistical perspective, having additional links to your site on search results pages increases the odds of you having users click through over time — so, breadcrumb links are highly desirable! Google does a fair job of automatically detecting these, but there are times when a page’s breadcrumb code isn’t interpreted successfully by them in order to be displayed in the snippet.

To increase your chances, use the breadcrumb markup on your site pages.

Once you’ve coded your page, check the code in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, which should reflect the breadcrumb links properly.

breadcrumbs semantic markup rich snippet

For local sites targeting a few local city names or with multiple offices around a metro area, breadcrumbs are very worthwhile.

Why Breadcrumbs are useful for SEO?

Enable an excellent and natural way to get keywords on to a page which then helps with Keyword Density.
Inform and define to search engines what the pages on the site are about. They achieve this through the internal links within the breadcrumb trail.
Are given a lot of importance by Google. A few years ago, Google started incorporating breadcrumb trails into search results. The Google Webmaster Tools help offers guidance on how to assign different properties which you can label using Schemas. Using schemas will make the pages recognizable by Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex. Interestingly enough, last month, Google published a patent on displaying breadcrumb links in search results, which amongst other things indicates that they intend to augment the search experience by displaying breadcrumb trails in results. Whilst the patent seems to indicate that such trails will be displayed even for those sites that do not have breadcrumbs, it states that having a breadcrumb trail will make it easier for the search engine to understand the structure of a site and to include that kind of navigation within search results.
Show people their current location relative to higher-level concepts, helping them understand where they are in relation to the rest of the site.
Afford one-click access to higher site levels and thus rescue users who parachute into very specific but inappropriate destinations through search or deep links.
Never cause problems in user testing : people might overlook this small design element, but they never misinterpret breadcrumb trails or have trouble operating them.
Take up very little space on the page.

Breadcrumbs Best Practices:

Only use breadcrumbs when they help a user: for large, multi-level websites. These are for user first of all; if they also help SEO – that’s an additional benefit. Don’t add breadcrumbs just for the sake of adding good internal anchor text.
Do not link the current page to itself (the last step in the breadcrumbs should be un-linked);
Do not replace main navigation with breadcrumbs (breadcrumbs visualize your website structure horizontally while the main navigation shows its vertical structure listing its other categories and content types);
Use breadcrumbs consistently (this makes the user browsing your website feel safer and allows him to faster familiarize himself with how the site is structured)
Do not use breadcrumbs in the page <title> tag (this makes title too long and untargeted)