24 Nov, 2009
How to add a breadcrumb to your blog and have it appear on Google’s Search Result Snippet
Web Development » Google, Snippets, Tutorials, WordPress » How to add a breadcrumb to your blog and have it appear on Google’s Search Result Snippet
Google Search has recently introduced breadcrumbs in their Search Result Snippets replacing the URL displayed below the individual snippet. There are both advantages and disadvantages of this new feature. One immediate advantage that I see is if your search result snippet has a breadcrumb, your website will probably get more pageviews because the user is likely to click on a category name on the breadcrumb to navigate to the parent category and browse through related articles.
Not many search result snippets have a breadcrumb yet, so the question is, how does google obtain breadcrumb links from a website. I did a small research and found out that in order for google to display breadcrumbs for your website, your website / pages on your website must have one. If you look at individual blog posts on this blog, you will see a breadcrumb horizontally across the top of the blog post, just below the title. I’m using WordPress as my blog CMS and the following is the code I have inside single.php file of the current theme to display a breadcrumb for each blog post.
<p><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a> » <?php the_category(', ') ?> » <?php the_title(); ?></p>
