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This is techie jargon for a breadcrumb trail. These trails should show up at the top and bottom of your pages.
Have you ever seen this kind of navigation on a website?
Home > Books > Ernest Hemingway > The Old Man and the Sea
End users use breadcrumb trails for navigation, and at their most basic form the trail should allow users to easily navigate between a child page and it’s parents. Though it shouldn’t be used as primary navigation, since this is the reason we have menus and dropdowns, it most definitely should be in place as secondary navigation.
You probably already knew that much. What you may not know is that breadcrumb trails can serve as a fallback for search engines spiders. Let’s say you have a page that contains some odd, unencoded HTML characters, broken code, or something to that effect. Often, when spiders hit that piece of shrapnel, they will stop indexing that page.
A breadcrumb trail placed at the top and bottom of your pages will give spiders food to follow. Now, a page with the breadcrumb above has links to:
- the homepage
- the books category
- works by Hemingway
- the actual The Old Man and the Sea book
Whereas, if you didn’t have this breadcrumb trail, you could quite possibly be losing indexable pages.
