Breadcrumb Trail for SEO?
-
Due to the fact that we aren't in the #1 position, (dropped from #5 to page 2 - You have to love Devs and IT), our heads have hired a SEO Audit/Consultant company to review everything we are doing.
I would like to post some of the things they are telling us to do, in which I don't 100% agree with and would like some other professional feedback. Especially since their site isn't marketed very well.
http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com Disclaimer: (this site was a complete nightmare when I started a year and a half ago. Yes, there are many issues that still need to be addressed.)
Breadcrumb Trail
They have asked us to implement a Breadcrumb trail on every page, where the final page is the only H1 Tag.
- Are breadcrumb trials important for SEO? (I know they are helpful for Users, but SEO)
- Are they important for Search Engines to track back for structure.
- Any thoughts about them?
Similar question asked in February : http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs
-
We have bread crumbs on our main site and as Dejan describes.... "Another neat thing is in the SERPs when you get little: Top Level > Main Category > Sub Category type links under your snippet. " .... lots of these extra links appear in our SERPs.
Also, just yesterday we started adding breadcrumbs to our second most important site. This is part of a redesign for a site that was built a long time ago. It is a medium-size handbuilt site and adding the breadcrumbs is going to be a little costly.
We believe that breadcrumbs are very important for visitors, they help communicate the structure of your site to google and are important for making the navigation structure links appear in the Google SERPs.
-
and sorry for the duplicate reply..
-
Breadcrumbs are a great way to create "Virtual" content hubs, and establish yourself as an authority on a topic or theme.
-
Thank you both for the feedback.
-
I am not aware of any direct SEO advantages to using breadcrumbs. More specifically, I have not seen any indication that breadcrumbs are considered as part of Google's algorithm.
The only Matt Cutts video I have seen on the topic is 18 months old, and he just shared "users like them". We all know that Google is chasing the best user experience, so from a purely SEO standpoint I would suggest it should be on your "want to have" list.
From a user experience, breadcrumbs are well liked. From a SERP standpoint, Google can read the HTML5 microdata embedded in a well-designed breadcrumb and then display the breadcrumb. This information could help users gain confidence in the result. The breadcrumbs do work as active links to the various categories on your site. In reality, most Google users are presently not aware of this information but that knowledge will clearly grow in time.
-
Did you read Dejan's response on that page and notice how he referenced google videos and see how his response was marked as "good answer" and also as "staff endorsed"?
I think that you should get to work on your breadcrumbs.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Best SEO Strategy
Hi fellow Mozers: I have a question about strategy. I have a client who is a major real estate developer in our region. They build and sell condominiums and also built and manage several major rental apartments. All rental properties have their own websites and there is also a corporate website, which has been around for many years and has decent domain authority (+/- 40). The original intent of the corporate website was to communicate central brand positioning points, attract investors and offer individual profiles of all major properties. My client is interested in developing an organic search strategy which will reach consumers looking to rent apartments. Typical search strings would include the family whose core string would be 'apartments in Baltimore.' (Currently, the client runs PPC for each one of their properties. This is expensive and highly competitive.) In doing research, we've found that there are two local competitors who are able to break on to Page 1 and appear beside the National 'apartment search guides' who dominate the Page 1 SERPS (like apartments.com). The two local competitors have websites of either the same or lower authority than our client's; one has a better link profile, the other is comparable. Here's our problem: our local competitors only build and manage apartments. So, then, the home pages and all the content of their sites ONLY talk about apartment rental related information. Our client's apartment business is actually larger in scope than either local competitor but is only one of their major real estate verticals. So my question is this: if we want to build out a bunch of content which will rank competitively with our local competition, are we better off creating a new area of the corporate site, creating targeted content and resources appropriate for apartment seekers OR would we be better off creating an entirely new site, just devoted to the same? I'm wondering if a new section will ever rank well against competitors whose root domains actually feature content which is only rental related? Likewise, I'm wondering whether we'd be giving up too much, in terms of authority, by creating an entirely new site? I've also only found examples in the industry where an entirely new site was created, so it makes me question the strategy of building out a rental-specific section of a site which also contains information about their condo business. For instance, the Related Companies are a huge builder in the East; they have a corporate site and a site called https//relatedrentals.com . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Daaveey0 -
Which is the best SEO plugin for joomla
Hey there, can any one please tell me the Best plugin i can choose For joomla?? I am going use sh404ref & 2nd one i am thinking is EFSEO. If besides This do u know any Good One, Please Help to choose Best Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
To slash or not to slash - Going from no trailing slashes to trailing slashes sitewide
A friend has a large site and his dev team are about to launch with the sitewide addition of trailing slashes on urls, which are not on the original site. Both versions of the url work e.g. /example and /example/ and the dev team is reluctant to change back as it will take 3 days (developers hey?) My SEO mind tells me this is a bad thing. Yes you could: 301 from non slash to slash but sitewide I don't like the idea because of the small loss in link juice x lots of pages. You could canonical from non slash to slash but the non slash is the original and canonicals are supposed to point to the original version of the content. Any thoughts appreciated Couldn't the devs use the htaccess file to force the / version to the non / version?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
SEO of blogging websites
What are the best practices of doing SEO of article/blogging websites.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Subdomains + SEO
Hi everyone, So a little background - my company launched a new website (http://www.everyaction.com). The homepage is currently hosted on an amazon s3 bucket while the blog and landing pages are hosted within Hubspot. My question is - is that going to end up hurting our SEO in the long run? I've seen a much slower uptick in search engine traffic than I'm used to seeing when launching new sites and I'm wondering if that's because people are sharing the blog.everyaction.com url on social (which then wouldn't benefit just everyaction.com?) Anyways, a little help on what I should be considering when it comes to subdomains would be very helpful. Thanks, Devon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EveryActionHQ0 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
How do I Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit?
Right now, I am working on one E-Commerce website. I have found same content on that E-Commerce website from manufacturer website. You can visit following pages to know more about it. http://www.vistastores.com/casablanca-sectional-sofa-with-ottoman-ci-1236-moc.html http://www.abbyson.com/room/contemporary/casablanca-detail http://www.vistastores.com/contemporary-coffee-table-in-american-white-oak-with-black-lacquer-element-ft55cfa.html http://www.furnitech.com/ft55cfa.html I don't want to go with Robots.txt, Meta Robots NOINDEX & Canonical tag. Because, There are 5000+ products available on website with duplicate content. So, I am thinking to add Source URL on each product page with Do follow attribute. Do you think? That will help me to save my website from duplicate content penalty? OR How do I Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0 -
What are the best suites of SEO tools?
I normally use SEOmoz and a bit of SEMrush but I dont really know much outside of those two. Im looking to do a review of the big, trustworthy ones - along the lines of free trial price vs value ranktracking linkbuilding help onpage analysis and help competitor analysis reports I heard good things about Raven Tools and Web CEO. Ive seen mention of SEOpowersuite on this forum but the site looks spammy as hell Anyone have a view on those 5 tools or any others in a similar vein? Or any other top line criteria I should be looking at? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion
Stephen1