Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?
-
We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu.
i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets
Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets
There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops)
Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.
-
I would probably want to dig a bit deeper on why your team feels there's a need to remove breadcrumbs. From what I can see on the Chico's website, they do indeed use them: https://www.chicos.com/store/category/sweaters/cat8319278/
As well as proper structured markup: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicos.com%2Fstore%2Fcategory%2Fsweaters%2Fcat8319278%2F
To address your question more directly:
Properly marked-up breadcrumbs add another layer of meaning and organizational depth to your website, which is parsed by search engines and weighed when organizing SERPs. While I can't assume the direct impact their removal would have on your organic traffic, I would hesitate to "downgrade" your site in terms of semantic markup.
This sounds like to me like the issue could be less to do with the breadcrumbs themselves, but instead a styling (breadcrumbs too distracting/prominent), or an architectural issue (breadcrumbs list too long).
More helpful information on breadcrumbs and proper markup/structured data: https://audisto.com/insights/guides/2/
Hope this helps.
-Brian
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
-
Website analysis for SEO
Hi, We have been trying to gain ranking for 7 keywords for a year now but have been unsuccessful We are not sure where we are going wrong, if someone could please help us out, we are happy to pay for your time.
Technical SEO | | mframing0 -
Angular seo
Hi, how to do seo with angular ? is there an easy way to make google crawl your website healthy?
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Removal of all low PR links
I have a lot of old directory links which where done years ago, most I think will be effecting my site. Is there away to find them all ie through open explorer and then remove them in one go?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Pager + SEO - Is it possible?
Hi, I am having this issue. I know that pager are not friends with SEO, but I want to know which is the best to do in this situations. for example, I work in a news company, and I have a lot of news pages that are very extensive so I use a pager. Well here I have the problem. suppose that the url is www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title When you enter that URL you are viewing the first page that has this meta: title keywords description Now, the problem comes when the user goes to the page 2 of this news article. What I shall do? 1- Change the url to www.mysite.com/news/id/here-comes-the-title-PAGE2 www.mysite.com/news/PAGE2-id/here-comes-the-title www.mysite.com/news/id/PAGE2/here-comes-the-title 2- in the page 2,3,4,5 ... add a meta robot noindex? In the option 2 I think that I am loosing the opportunity to index the body of my article. Is this correct? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Videos for SEO & Profits
Hello, I'm in the middle of developing a website that will be a tutorial site for SEO, http://universityofseo.com. My plan is to do video tutorials & blog posts to help entry-level SEOs and SMB Owners to help them become familiarized with SEO through quick and easy to watch videos. I eventually want to turn this into a revenue stream through advertisements. I want to know for both SEO and profit reasons, if I should host the videos on youtube and then embed them on my site, or do something like Bits on the Run / Whistia and put ads in the videos that way? I'm not overly obsessed with monetizing the site, but it would be nice to do it, but first and foremost i'm concerned with optimizing the site, having great and actionable content, then monetizing it. I'd appreciate any help on this matter, Zach
Technical SEO | | Zachary_Russell0 -
Dedicated ip helpful for seo
I read somewhere a while back that having a dedicated ip address was helpful for seo if this true or just another rumor? Also I read you should purchase your domain name for multiple yrs, what do you guys think?
Technical SEO | | TinaGammon0 -
Geotargeting by IP and SEO
Hi, Part of our site displays localized results based on the user's IP (we get the zipcode based on IP). For example a user in NY would get a list of NY based stores, while a user in CA would get a list of CA based stores. So if CA Googlebot comes to our site, it will get results based on Mountain View CA. Given the pages are generated based on your zip, I'm not sure how we'd indicate to Google that we have results for lots of locations and not just the Googlebot IP locations. (users can change their zipcode, but by default we use geolocation). Our landing pages contain localized content and unique urls with the zipcode etc, but it isn't clear how Google will find results for KY etc.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1