Comments on: Google Testing Breadcrumb Navigation Within SERP Results

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:31:05 +0000

Hi Mike

Interesting that this test has been running for a little while, but tests regularly last over 30 days. Seems that they tested multiple variations of this particular feature, which was also noteworthy.

Tanks for dropping by,
Richard

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:15:33 +0000

I had noticed breadcrumbs in Google SERPS in early July. I was seeing them placed a little differently then the screen shots above.

By: Fabio Ricotta

Fabio Ricotta — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:30:21 +0000

Do you know the country that it appeared? Is it for all queries or just for one?

By: Pablo Almeida

Pablo Almeida — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 18:01:45 +0000

Information Architecture rules!

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:58:58 +0000

Hi Stuart

How’s tricks? I’d say they have some far more advanced techniques to determine if a parent HTML element might contain breadcrumbs. It’s probably also to do with site architecture – if the breadrumbs consistently point to pages above/below in your architecture it might signal a breadcrumb.

@Kieran – I’d imagine they use on-site criteria to determine this.

@Leo – thanks for sending this on to me. I’d probably hold off adding breadcrumbs based only on this test just for now. They test a lot of changes, many of which never see the light of day, so it might be worth waiting to see. I’m not entirely sure how this will affect the sites either.

Personally from a user perspective I think this change might confuse, and given that sitelinks and mini-sitelinks are already out there I don’t see huge value from a user-perspective. Of course just my opinion of course.

Rgds to all, and thanks for dropping by to comment
Richard

By: Stewart Curry

Stewart Curry — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 08:45:04 +0000

Could it be searching the HTML for something like ‘div class/id=”breadcrumbs”‘ – something simple like that?

By: Leo Fogarty

Leo Fogarty — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:18:27 +0000

Actually the breadcrumbs that appear in the serps match the breadcrumbs on the actual sites. The other results that didnt display breadcrumbs were either root domains or internal pages of sites that didn’t use breadcrumbs. So if your not using breadcrumbs, I’d maybe reconsider.

By: searchbrat

searchbrat — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:13:01 +0000

It looks as if Google are pulling those from DMOZ categories or something similiar !!. Probably not. Google are building up to a couple of big changes I think. Next year is going to be really interesting. I feel we are in for a lot of big developments.