What are Bread Crumbs? – Definition, Types And More (2023)

Definition Bread Crumbs

Bread crumbs are a kind of secondary navigation system that shows the user’s location on a website or Web application. The term comes from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale in which the two title children drop breadcrumbs to form a trail back to their home.

 A breadcrumb is a small text path, located at the top of a page.

Bread crumbs also appear on Google. Search engines can collect this data and thus show the breadcrumbs in the search results. These provide users with an easy to understand overview of where the page is on their site.

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Importance of Bread Crumbs for SEO

Bread crumbs are one of the most important aspects in terms of essential elements in any correctly optimized website. This small navigation marks not only help people visualize where they are on a specific web page, but also help Google determine how a page is structured, here is its importance. Let’s see how they work:

Types of BreadCrumbs

These are the two most common types

Hierarchy based

They are the ones that appear most frequently. This type of route indicates where you are in a page structure and how many steps you can take to return to the main page. Something like Home> Blog> Category> Publication name.

Based on history

Those based on our browsing history gets sorted according to what you have been doing on the site. You have to think of them as a replacement for an Internet history bar. It would be something like: Start> Previous page> Previous page> Previous page> Current page.

Advantages

There are several advantages to using bread crumbs on a website. Here are the most important:

Breadcrumbs offer Google another way to find out how your website is structured.

On top of that, Google could use bread crumbs to display them in search results. In this way, the result of your search will become much more attractive to users. To increase the possibility of obtaining these bread crumbs in Google, you must add structured data.

Improve the user experience

Bread crumbs can help you in terms of user experience as it is an interface element that instantly shows people an exit.

How to include Bread crumbs in your page

There are several ways to add this crumbs on your website:

For WordPress, you can use one of the many breadcrumb add-ons or use Yoast SEO.

For a different CMS, the process may be different. It is also possible to add them by hand.

If you want them to appear on Google too, you need to use structured data in a way that Google can interpret.

This code can often appear within single.php or page.php files, just above the page title. Try not to add it to functions.php as this could create problems.

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