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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> &raquo; <?php the_category(', ') ?> &raquo; <?php the_title(); ?></p>

Google search sesult snippet + Breadcrumb on a blog post

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7 Responses to "How to add a breadcrumb to your blog and have it appear on Google’s Search Result Snippet"

1 | Jimmy

November 24th, 2009 at 11:22 am

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thank you for providing the code for the breadcrumbs – clear and informative. I will try this on my blog now.

2 | Eric Lightbody

December 12th, 2009 at 5:53 am

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I’m curious where you have found your informatio. So far I have been unable to find anything that shows how google is actually creating the breadcrumb structure.

3 | eisabai

December 12th, 2009 at 9:11 am

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This post might give you the answer you’re looking for: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/11/breadcrumbs-in-googles-snippets.html Basically, google just uses the breadcrumb you have on your website, provided it can detect it.

4 | zhang

December 17th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

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Seems that it doesn’t work. There are no breadcrumbs in the search results when I search your article on Google.

5 | WebDev

January 8th, 2010 at 10:38 pm

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Great post. Are there other ways to implement breadcrumbs?

6 | zhiqiang

January 28th, 2010 at 12:11 am

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I’m back and search your blog again. There is no breadcrumbs in the search results too. I think the breadcrumb in the page is not the only condition of Google’s breadcrumb

7 | eisabai

January 29th, 2010 at 11:25 am

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Hi,

Can you pls let me know what keywords you were searching for? When I searched for keyword iphone on this site, there are some results with breadcrumbs on google as you can see at
http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=iphone+site%3Aeisabainyo.net. Not all results have breadcrumbs, but that’s another issue.

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