Why Breadcrumbs Are Not SEO Friendly For Your Blog?

Breadcrumb navigation is a function actually meant for the visitors of your blog or website. Breadcrumbs are supposed to make their experience on your blog easier by providing them with an alternative mode of commuting within the website. It also enables them to keep track of where they are in the hierarchy of website by clearly listing the pages that they have been to in order to reach where they are now.

But though breadcrumbs add to the usability of a site or a blog they are not exactly SEO friendly and can have a negative impact on your blog’s search engine rankings.

Recommend For You: Boost Your Blog Traffic With Scoop.It

There are three types of breadcrumbs and each one is commonplace now on the Internet especially on larger websites.

Read Also:

1. Easy Guide To Pinterest For SEO
2. 9 Videos That Tell How To Do Better SEO & Drive More Traffic

• Category-based breadcrumbs – This form of breadcrumb navigation is usually seen on e-commerce websites that sell products which fall under a number of categories. 
• Location-based breadcrumbs – These breadcrumbs are normally seen on websites that have depth of content so that visitors may know where they are in the hierarchy of the website.
• Path-based breadcrumbs – These breadcrumbs show the course the visitor has taken through the website with step-by-step links to previous web pages given. 

In most cases, breadcrumb navigation is not SEO friendly for your blog. This is because breadcrumbs especially the path-based ones have a negative effect on your blog’s permalinks which have a huge role to play in targeting keywords. Breadcrumbs affect the way your blog’s permalinks are displayed in search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Basically, permalinks contain keywords and together they form the different URLs of the several pages of your blog. Since keywords are the reason your blog ranks high on search engines, when you use breadcrumb navigation, these keyword-rich permalinks are replaced by the labels you use as breadcrumbs for your different web pages resulting in a decline in rankings.

You May Like To Read:

1. SEO Tips For Small Businesses
2. Why Keyword Selection Impacts Your SEO Campaign
3. Google Launches Disavow Links Tool For Webmasters
4. 10 Features You Should Have To Become A SEO Expert
5. Matt Cutts: What Is Google's View On Guest Blogging For Links?

Thus, for blogs especially the ones that don’t have a lot of pages that make visitors journey deeper into the website, breadcrumb navigation is not required. In fact, it doesn’t even offer much functionality in these cases as they pretty much work like the ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons present in all browsers. If you don’t make use of breadcrumb navigation in your blog then Googlebot will continue ranking you high in search engine rankings as then its criteria will be based on your SEO friendly keywords and not the labels that you use to denote the different pages through breadcrumb navigation.

However, there are cases where using breadcrumb navigation can end up increasing the functionality of a website like in the case of e-commerce websites. Since these websites have hundreds of products listed they tend to be full of tags and categories. These can prove to be very confusing for users who tend to get lost in the complicated maze that these websites can be. Thus, it is necessary for such sites to have breadcrumb navigation to simplify things for the user and let them be aware of their location on the website. 

Author - This is a guest post by Samantha Kirk of mytechhelp.com, a site that offers savings and current information on Toshiba Support.