
A breadcrumb trail on a page indicates the page's position in the site hierarchy. A user can navigate all the way up in the site hierarchy, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb in the breadcrumb trail.
Examples
Google Search uses breadcrumb markup in the body of a web page to categorize
the information from the page in search results. Often, as illustrated in
following use cases, users can arrive at a page from very different types of
search queries. While each search may return the same web page, the breadcrumb
categorizes the content within the context of the Google Search query. The page
ancillaryjustice.html
might display the following breadcrumb trails
depending upon the search context:
A search query for the book title "Ancillary Justice" may generate the following breadcrumb:
Books › Authors › Ann Leckie › Ancillary Justice
Here's an example in JSON-LD to support that breadcrumb:
A search query for a year and genre-based award, "2014 Nebula Award best novel", may generate the following breadcrumb:
Books › Science Fiction › Ancillary Justice
Here's an example in RDFa to support that breadcrumb:
Here's an example in Microdata to support that breadcrumb:
Here's an example of a multiple breadcrumb trail:
Books ›
Science Fiction ›
Award Winners
Literature ›
Speculative Fiction
Here's the example RDFa to support that breadcrumb:
Here's the example Microdata to support that breadcrumb:
HTML Example
Insert the HTML breadcrumb block within the page as part of the visual design. The HTML breadcrumb trail for the Guidelines example might be:
<ol> <li> <a href="http://www.example.com/books">Books</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://www.example.com/sciencefiction">Science Fiction</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://www.example.com/books/sciencefiction/awardwinners">Award Winners</a> </li> <ol>
Guidelines
In addition to the
general structured data guidelines,
Social Profile markup should create one or more breadcrumb trails without a
crumb for the target page if it's possible to find the page within a larger set
of search results. Continuing the previous examples, because the search query
award winning science fiction novels would find many other pages in addition
to ancillaryjustice.html
, you might include the breadcrumb trail to reflect the
broader search category:
Books › Science Fiction › Award Winners
Structured data type definitions
Google Search recognizes the following properties of a BreadcrumbList. You must include the required properties for your content to be eligible for display as a rich result.
Required properties | |
---|---|
item |
The URL to the webpage that represents the breadcrumb. |
name |
The title of the breadcrumb displayed for the user. |
position |
The position of the breadcrumb in the breadcrumb trail. Position 1 signifies the beginning of the trail. |