What are Rich Snippet Breadcrumbs?

Updated June 7, 2024

Creating a Trail for Visitors

While Google has done some things that certainly make it a challenge to achieve visibility on the search engine, it has also introduced features that attract searchers to your results — if you take advantage of them. One of those things are rich snippets, which provide additional information about your website results in the SERPs as well as more links to your Web presence. Rich snippet breadcrumbs were later added, and they enable visitors to better understand the layout of your site.

Rich Snippets

Google started rich snippets to better serve visitors; however, they’re also beneficial for website owners. There are various types of rich snippets, and breadcrumbs are just one. Here are some more common rich snippets that you may have seen:

• Sitelinks
• Movie and event times
• Recipes
• Product reviews

The links, thumbnails and special formatting help bring attention to your listing, but they also provide searchers with more information without ever having to leave the search engine, so it ultimately helps Google, too.

Breadcrumbs

You might already be familiar with breadcrumbs because you use them on your own site. This trails shows the structure of your site, provides internal links and provides visitors with an additional form of navigation. An example of breadcrumbs is as follows:

Home > About Us > Our Real Estate Team

Google now enables you to format breadcrumbs so that Google can show them on the SERPs. Google doesn’t guarantee that breadcrumbs will appear, but using the correct formatting increases that likelihood.

Rich Snippets on a SERP

Breadcrumbs are useful for a variety of reasons. Like any rich snippet, it helps your website’s result stand apart in the SERPs. Breadcrumbs snippets also enable visitors to navigate directly to the categories and other pages on your site when they show up in rich breadcrumbs, which means they’re one step closer to getting what they need. If you write a stellar tutorial about staging a home for selling on your real estate blog, it might be in the “How To” category. Readers can easily see all your guides by clicking this entry from the search results.

Plus, breadcrumbs get you a lot more links using your preferred keywords on the search results page than a traditional entry. Google will know to index pages linked in breadcrumbs for sure. This helps maximize incoming traffic with little effort on your own part. All you have to do is set up breadcrumbs to begin with.

Have you implemented Rich Snippets for your website?