What are breadcrumbs? Why is this important for SEO? • Yoast

Breadcrumbs are an essential part of almost every good website. These little navigation aids not only tell people where they are on your site, but they also help Google figure out how your website is structured. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to add these helpful little tips. Let’s see how breadcrumb navigation works.

What are breadcrumbs?

A breadcrumbs is a small text path, often at the top of a page, that indicates where the user is on the site. On yoast.com, the way to us Keyword Research Guide is Home > SEO Blog > Content SEO > Keyword Research > Keyword Research for SEO: The Ultimate Guide. This route shows you where you are right away. Every step of that path is clickable, returning to the home page.

But why is this navigation aid called a breadcrumb? When Hansel and Gretel went into the forest, Hansel dropped pieces of bread on the ground so that they could find their way home if they got lost. These crumbs eventually became the model for the ones we see on websites.

They also appear in Google search results, and you can take advantage of this if you use Yoast SEO or add the correct form of structured data to your website. Breadcrumbs in search results give users an easy-to-understand overview of where the page is on your site.

Yoast SEO automatically adds the necessary structured data – a BreadcrumbList – in JSON-LD format. Just flip the switch in the settings, and you’ll see the relevant lines appear in your source code – although,...