GlossarySEO
What are breadcrumbs on a website?
Also called: breadcrumb navigation, breadcrumb trail
Definition
Breadcrumbs are a row of links, like Home › Glossary › Crawl budget, that shows where a page sits in a site's hierarchy. They help visitors move up a level and help search engines understand structure.
Breadcrumbs, explained
Google's breadcrumb documentation describes a breadcrumb trail as an indication of the page's position in the site hierarchy, which helps users understand and explore a site. Each crumb is a link to a parent page, and the last item is the current page, usually not linked.
They do three jobs for SEO. They create internal links from every detail page back to its hubs, which strengthens the hub pages and keeps depth low. They make the hierarchy explicit, so a comparison page is clearly part of the comparisons section. And with BreadcrumbList structured data, Google can use the trail when it shows your URL in results. Google's current documentation says breadcrumbs display in search results on desktop.
Google recommends breadcrumbs that represent a typical user path to a page, rather than simply mirroring the URL structure. A product in several categories can have more than one trail; Google's docs allow multiple BreadcrumbList items on a page. Keep the visible breadcrumbs and the structured data in sync, because markup should describe what users can see.
Put them near the top of the page, keep labels short and match them to the page titles of the parents. Skip them on the homepage and on flat sites with no real hierarchy.
Why it matters for founders
On sites with hubs and many detail pages, breadcrumbs are a cheap, consistent source of internal links and a clearer URL display in desktop results.
Example
Each glossary page shows Glossary › Term at the top, with matching BreadcrumbList JSON-LD, so every term links back to the glossary hub and search results show the path.
Common mistakes
- Breadcrumb labels that don't match the linked pages.
- Structured data trails that differ from the visible breadcrumbs.
- Unlinked crumbs for parent pages.
- Breadcrumbs that mirror messy URL folders instead of a sensible path.
Sources
Checked
Related terms
- Breadcrumb schemaBreadcrumb schema is
BreadcrumbListstructured data that describes a page's position in the site hierarchy as an ordered list of links, which Google can show in place of the URL in results. - Site architectureSite architecture is how a website's pages are organized and linked: the hierarchy of sections, the URL structure and the internal links between them. Good architecture helps crawlers and people find every important page quickly.
- Internal linkingInternal linking is linking from one page on your site to another page on the same site. It helps visitors and crawlers find pages and tells search engines which pages matter and what they're about.
- Structured data (JSON-LD)Structured data is machine-readable information about a page, usually written as JSON-LD using the schema.org vocabulary. It helps search engines understand what a page is about and can make it eligible for rich results.