Do we need breadcrumbs?
-
I found myself in a weird position today having to defend the use of breadcrumbs.... This is what I wrote....
From an SEO point of view it is best practice to have breadcrumbs as they are high up in the code and help the search engines crawling the site. Do you need a breadcrumb for SEO – Yes – as well as from a usability point of you view users can navigate a breadcrumb instead of hitting the back button.
What would you have said?
-
Hi h2o2, maybe the phrasing wasnt clear but I think you misunderstood:
"For bigger sites especially I really wouldnt advise not using breadcrumbs."
-
@ Andy Mackean
Hi Andy, Do you mind elaborating on why could breadcrumbs negatively impact for spreading your link juice if you have a large site?
-
Breadcrumbs are a great way for engines to understand how your site is structured and to pass link juice logically and evenly to the places you want it. For bigger sites especially I really wouldnt advise not using breadcrumbs.
-
Yeah I think your list is looking good
Enhances ability for search engines to crawl the site.
Potential for Breadcrumb to appear in SERPs thus enhancing your listing - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmOjX5DlN2A
Usability - users tend to attempt using a breadcrumb for navigation
Usability - users find it easier to understand how the site is built and how the navigation works
More pages are likely to be viewed by customers as breadcrumbs provide easy access to similar and alternate products
Successful popular sites such as Amazon use breadcrumbs alongside other navigation to help customers.
You might want to point out that you can make the font size and font colour subtle so it is clearly visible to users but doesn't impact on design and maybe send a screen shot with a few examples?
-
Hi Matt,
Pondering how to rephrase into bullet points the key factors to engage with him about. Simple straight forward layman's English to why bullet points are needed.
So far :-
Enhances ability for search engines to crawl the site.
Potential for Breadcrumb to appear in SERPs thus enhancing your listing - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmOjX5DlN2A
Usability - users tend to attempt using a breadcrumb for navigation
Usability - users find it easier to understand how the site is built and how the navigation
What do you think ?....
-
You are right not all sites indexed with breadcrumbs show breadcrumbs in the SERPs - here is Matt Cutts take on this which might be useful for you
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmOjX5DlN2A
I would put together an example of a few top preforming sites that are leading the way in e-commerce that have breadcrumbs in order to support your argument. It is hard to comment on whether your site looks good. Your client must remember that a good looking design is important but not at the sacrifice of usability else your customers will soon go else were as you will find it is all about how quickly and easily they can access the information they are looking for. If any parts of your design hinder this you will soon know about it...
Is the site not likely to preform as well in the SERPs - well Google has integrated them for a reason - improving their search results. On a very basic level you will have more information against your listing - including extra links so this is likely to aid the user and encourage them to click on your result.
Breadcrumbs are essentially a form of rich snippet and they add value to your listing -
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=185417&topic=1088474&ctx=topic
Also one other thing is that breadcrumbs don't have to be in a massive bright font from a design point of view. A smaller grey font in a white space above the product(s) can work just as well and get listed. If you do a search for products you will see some well known sites use this tact..
-
Not all pages indexed in google with breadcrumbs show the breadcrumb in the results. How does google decide which sites to show breadcrumbs on and which not to.
Is the site lightly to not perform as well in search engines without breadcrumbs? The client does not seem to be thinking about usability - he is more concerned that he thinks it looks good....
-
I would have said that breadcrumbs are a positive as they show the user the exact location of the product they are looking at and give them an easy trail to find similar/alternative products. The other areas of navigation in close proximity only show one level (presuming your client means nav menu etc?). Then I would also say that some of the most successful websites such as Amazon still use breadcrumbs in order to help customers from a usability point of view. From a search engine point of view; Google actually displays the breadcrumbs in the search results giving you more links in each search listing, which is a positive thing. Breadcrumbs in search results is likely to help increase click-through as the person searching might not be after the exact result listed but they can see you have a category for those products, so they can click straight through and see if you have exactly what they are looking for.
It must also be remembered that product pages can be accessed a number of different ways - search on site, search off site, links from other sites, through the navigation menu and so on. Therefore a clear trail for the user will help them locate other similar products and make it easier to navigate and engage with the website, meaning higher average pageviews and a lower bounce rate...
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
-
Please help need experienced eyes
We own discount banner printing and we are trying to rank 1 for pvc banners or vinyl banners and cannot understand for example how the below is correct, we did suffer a link penalty years ago but we fixed this and the domain has some good links (more and better quality than the sites above us) and cannot understand how we rank below most of the sites above us? If we type on for example pvc banners we get http://www.bannershop.co.uk/cats/pvc_banners.htm https://www.hfe-signs.co.uk/banners.php http://bannerprintingandroid.co.uk/pvc-banners/ http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html (our website) And if we type in vinyl banners we get http://www.vistaprint.co.uk/banners.aspx http://www.bigvaluebanners.co.uk/ http://vinylbannersprinting.co.uk/ http://www.discountdisplays.co.uk/html/vinyl_banners.html https://www.buildasign.co.uk/banners http://www.monkey-print.com/outdoor banners/budget-outdoor-banners http://www.discountbannerprinting.co.uk/banners/vinyl-pvc-banners.html (Our website)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Help needed on HTTPS
Hi Can anyone help me. I need some help with some example of large e-commerce sites going to https. Ideally these need to be e-commerce sites but any large site will be great, so that I can show the impact. The site can be based anywhere in the world, its more the impact I am after. Thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Need opinion to split the site for speed up the SEO process
We have two versions of our website English and Arabic. Arabic is in a sub-directory www.oncarx.com/ar (Not a Sub Domain). When we started SEO, we found that most of our Articles are plagiarized and contain non-original content. We are almost done with the optimization of our Arabic articles. English site contains too many articles and are not optimized for SEO. For getting good results and speed up the process, which of the following idea is better? We should separate the English and Arabic sites. We should remove most of the articles from English site. If there is any other good option, please let us know.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sagha0 -
Adding Meta Languange tag to xhtml site - coding help needed
I've had my site dinged by Google and feel it's likely several quality issues and I'm hunting down these issues. One of Bing's Webmaster SEO tools said my xhtml pages (which were built in 2007) are missing Meta Language and suggested adding tag in the or on the html tag. Wanting to "not mess anything up" and validate correctly, I read in **W3C's site and it said: ** "Always add a lang attribute to the html tag to set the default language of your page. If this is XHTML 1.x you should also use the xml:lang attribute (with the same value). Do not use the meta element with http-equiv set to Content-Language." My current html leads like: QUESTION:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mlm12
I'm confused on how to add the Meta Language to my website given my current coding as I"m not a coder. Can you suggest if I should add this content-language info, and if so, what is the best way to do so, considering valid w3c markup for my document type? Thank you!!!
Michelle0 -
Online Store With 4 Products Available in 50 Sizes, Need Tips Categories/Products
I own and manage 2 online stores selling furnace filters. http://www.furnacefilterscanada.com and http://www.filtrationmontreal.com/ We have 4 different qualities furnace filters and each of them are avaible in almost 50 different sizes. My store is setup with almost 200 different products. ( 4 filtres X 50 sizes) None of them have variable. This was a lots of work to create 200 different products. The reason I did this is because when searching in search engine, vistors will use such keywords: 16x20x4 filter 20x25x2 furnace filter a/c filter 10x20x1 replacement filter online 20x20x1 16x25x5 filter toronto and so on... Must keywords request in search engine will included the furnace filter size. QUESTIONS: all my products descriptions are the same, the only difference is the filter size, is this Duplicate Content? will it be better to sell 4 filters with 50 variables? if my store use variable I don't see how I will rank on Google when shopper search for keyword like mention before in this post. My page name will always be the same. My description page the same and so on... Furnace Filters Canada is on BigCommerce platform and I love it. I'm in the process of moving Filtration Montreal to CoreCommerce. You can have a look at it here http://furnacefilter.corecommerce.com I'm very limited in SEO knowledge, the way I have setup http://furnacefilter.corecommerce.com I thing is the best way for SEO. What is your opinion & recommendations. Thank you for your help, BigBlaze
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2050 -
Hierachy in a Title Tag Needed?
When coding the title tags of a website, is it important to note the hierarchy of the website so the search engine can find that page? So, for example, the title tag would be, for a subcategory: Webpage Subcategory>Category>Website name Does this help the search engine rankings at all? Or can the search engines figure out the hierarchy by reading a sitemap or the HTML readable navigation? Then you could focus on the descriptive keywords of the subcategory page for the title tag. Also, should you always include the site name in the title tag?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConnellyPartners0 -
Building a Large Local Services Directory - Subdomain Needed?
In 2012 we will be rolling out a directory of local services for our industry. This will ultimately be thousands of additional pages, with city/zip searching, individual provider pages etc. The main reason is for UX -- providing local resources for our industry to compliment the online experience (we're an online B2C retailer) My question is if there are pros/cons to putting this on a subdomain, or if having it on the root is ideal. I don't see a huge influx of backlinks (making a sub fine) but I suppose that could change down the road. I do see some indexing benefits for new terms like 'service x in los angeles' etc, but that would also be fine on a sub. It feels like it would be cleaner to keep separate and on a sub, but maybe we're missing something. We certainty don't want to hurt anything on our primary site which drives the business. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOPA0 -
Google +one button - help needed
Can someone from this wonderful community answer the question. The link is http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-one-button-help-needed-2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050