BreadCrumb Navigation – Google Now Indexes

by Frank Pipolo on December 8, 2009

in Google

Planet Ocean talked about how Google is now indexing and using your breadcrumb navigation as the display URL.  Why is this so important? Lets take a look:

breadcrumb navigation

As you can see the old way Google showed your URL compaired to the new way IF you use breadcrumb navigation on your site.  Google does this by pulling what are called breadcrumbsstraight from the site. So now potential visitors know that allrecipies.com has a recipe for chili and recipes for Soups, Stews and Chili as well.

breadcrumb

Just in case you think breadcrumbs are just for cooking, here’s what this site’s breadcrumb navigation looks like once you click their listing.

As you can see this type of site navigation allows your visitors to easily know where they are on your site and gives them a chance to quickly navigate to another page.

But wait there’s more! Yes, it’s great that your site’s search result listing is that much more user friendly. However, the news that will make you seriously look into breadcrumb navigation is that each of those breadcrumb categories displayed in the search result is also a link to that page within the site. That’s 3 additional clickable links for just one of this site’s listings.

Breadcrumb navigation is something your site visitors will love and from the looks of this recent update – it’s a great way to skyrocket your site’s deep link ratio and get more link juice to your site! Another new update that will be included in Google Caffeine!

So my take on why this is so important.  Let’s start off by saying that with breadcrumb navigation you now have the ability to have “Site Links” on every listing. Site links are extra links Google’s has been known to give away for top position sites that included the terms in the links.  I have had website in the #1 position (search “new homes” in Google and see www.newhomes.com) and have see a 20% increase in traffic when Google granted us these links. Also from this 20% lift in traffic I have seen a higher conversion rate because the traffic that clicked on these links was very targeted and saw exactly what they were looking for thus converting higher.

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