Google replaces URLs with breadcrumb links in search results

thank you for you information, i must be careful with that now.

I wonder how they are dealing with the differences in architecture on individual sites. On a WordPress blog for example, you will have category pages, but by default these are placed inside a “category” level which doesn’t have any content, meaning or value. It would look pretty nasty to see this in the breadcrumb.

They are also inferring that you want to highlight the inner workings of your site for that particular search result which may not be the case. Consider the case of a landing page – where you are trying to send people to a focused destination without distraction. Here you are enabling the visitor to move off course which could effect conversions.

I like that it provides more choice for people, but it does seem to make a lot of assumptions.

Usability wise, if they changed the > color to gray (rather than green), so that it looks more like a classic breadcrumb with non-click-able separators and links it would help the understanding that you can access multiple sections of the site via this string.

Interesting for sure.

This development seems to confirm the idea that more users are not visiting sites through the homepage any more. It appears that Google are trying to help users find their way around once they have dived into a deep section of the site. I think this could be good for users but have no idea how it might effect businesses.

@IrishWonder – aye, definitely think that should be how this should be implemented, you have control to an extent over sitelinks appearing in your results so really they should offer the option here. I’m not against them as such, I just don’t really see the point.

I don’t think it will cause too much confusion and may have a positive effect, because if your title tag is correct it gives a targetted entry to your site, as well as the category section too.
What will be interesting to see is which results this gets applied too. Looks like they are trailling with product results, but the other logical results would be for sites where they had created Sitelinks.
I can’t see service based businesses needing to worry too much at the moment, however product based businesses probably need to make sure their product pages are correctly optimised.

Another issue that occured to me, from an analytics point of view – if a user seaerches for a particular product by name, but entered one or two levels up in the hirearchy from the results page, you would start to see landing pages with keywords associated that they are not optimised for – could cause confusion to some degree particulary depending how the user behaviour on the site might change if they go in a few levels up.

Just wehn you learn and build around certain SEO techniques that Google likes, they go and change things and leave people hanging with what and how to implement new techiniques..

I agree it is a useful trend for sites that are well designed and properly demarcated, but may be a problem for older sites. Hmmm, maybe that is why Google is doing it? I have an older online business site that has pretty long urls. is that a problem?