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
-
Multi Store SEO Drop
I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations. I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
301 Redirect in breadcrumb. How bad is it?
Hi all, How bad is it to have a link in the breadcrumb that 301 redirects? We had to create some hidden category pages in our ecommerce platform bigcommerce to create a display on our category pages in a certain format. Though whilst the category page was set to not visable in bigcommerce admin the URL still showed in the live site bread crumb. SO, we set a 301 redirect on it so it didnt produce a 404. However we have lost a lot of SEO ground the past few months. could this be why? is it bad to have a 301 redirect in the breadrcrumb.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Does cache-control : private hurt SEO?
Hi, I recently found I can no longer view our web pages in Google's cache. I get 404 errors. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ashop.nordstrom.com%2Fc%2Fwomens-shoes&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751US751&oq=cache%3Ashop.nordstrom.com%2Fc%2Fwomens-shoes&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.3575j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 I did a fetch and render in Search Console and found our header includes a "cache-control: private" entry. The 404's started happening recently. Would this response be the culprit? If Google cannot cache the website, is this bad for SEO? On the surface of it, it sounds bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shop.nordstrom0 -
Technical SEO
Where can I find knowledge of enhanced and technical SEO for all type of websites ( mainly E-Commerce)? Please share some good sources (PDFs, Videos, Checklist etc)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Has this site been a victim of negative seo?
The rankings for our client's site - www.yourlifeprotected.co.uk fell off the face of the earth back in June. Despite trying a huge number of things to try and help the site recover, we've seen no real positive improvements since then. Examples of things we have tried: Disavowed & manually removed poor quality Links Removed any internal Duplicate Content Removed any broken links Re-written all website content to ensure unique & high quality No-Followed all outbound links Added any missing title tags changed hosting Rewritten content to ensure no duplication internally or externally The most recent issue we've picked up is that some highly spammy sites seem to have copied extracts of text from the website and hidden them in their pages. This is a rather puzzling one, as there aren't backlinks, pointing to our site - just the copy. For example - Cancer Page and Diabetes Page.It feels very much as though this could be a negative SEO attack which could be responsible for the drop in rankings and traffic the site has experienced. If this is the case, what can we do about it?! Having already re-written the copy on the site, we obviously dont want to do this again unnecessarily - especially if this could just happen again in future! Any help or advice would be hugely appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Is hidden content bad for SEO?
I am using this plugin to enable Facebook comments on my blog:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | soralsokal
https://wordpress.org/plugins/fatpanda-facebook-comments/ This shows the comment in an Facebook iFrame. The plugin author claims it's SEO friendly, because the comments are also integrated in the WordPress database. The are included in the post but hidden. Is that bad for SEO?0 -
Suggestions for a SEO Review
I think it would be beneficial to have a third party seo review of the network of sites my team and I manage and was wondering if any of you had suggestions for what sort of tests should be done or that we should expect to see done during one of these reviews. We are a small team who has varying seo experience and have been working hard to make improvements to our sites in the past year. Most of our sites have been completely overhauled in the last 12-16 months and seo work that had not been done in the past has been setup, along with some corrections that may have been harming seo. We believe we are on the right track and have learned a good amount about seo in that time, but it would be nice to have some "expert" feedback outside of our office to get a clearer picture on anything we may be missing or some suggested improvements. A sort of double check on the work we have done.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | unikey0 -
Is this link SEO-Friendly?
Hi Mozzers, Was wondering if someone could tell me if this link is SEO-friendly? class = "sl">name="sc" type="checkbox" value="1449"><a <span="">href</a> <a <span="">="</a>http://www.example.com/" onclick = "Javascript: return dosc(2);">src="imsd/coff.gif" id="cbsc2"/>Keyword It has some Javascript that makes the link work like a filter. Cheers, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0