Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation trail that shows where the current page sits within a site's hierarchy.

A breadcrumb usually appears near the top of a page as a row of links, such as Home > Category > Subcategory > Current Page. It reflects the structural path to the page rather than the user's click history. Each step except the last is a link, letting visitors move up the hierarchy in one click.

For users they reduce friction by making the site structure visible and giving an easy way back to parent sections. For SEO they reinforce site architecture: the internal links in a breadcrumb help search engines understand how pages relate and distribute relevance through the hierarchy. They also create logical, descriptive internal links using real category names rather than generic anchors.

Breadcrumbs can be marked up with BreadcrumbList structured data, which lets search engines display the hierarchy in place of a raw URL in the results. The markup should mirror the visible trail and the actual path to the page. Keep the trail consistent with your real canonical structure so the hierarchy you advertise matches the one search engines crawl.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
  "itemListElement": [
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://example.com/" },
    { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Guides", "item": "https://example.com/guides/" }
  ]
}

Related: Canonical Tag, Missing Structured Data, Crawl Budget Explained