Breadcrumb
The you are here row. It shows the path down from the home page.
What does Breadcrumb mean?
A short row of links, usually near the top of a page, that shows the path from the home page to where you are, so you can step back up.
Also called: breadcrumb trail
When they earn their place
A remodeler with pages for kitchens, baths, and additions gives a visitor a way back to the project list without hunting the header. A glossary like this one uses them so a definition sits inside a set, not as a dead-end article.
They can also be described with schema markup, which tells crawlers the same path the visitor sees. The visible row is the part that matters to a person. The label is optional extra.
A small design rule
Keep the words short and identical to the pages they name. If the menu says Roof repair, the crumb should not say Residential steep-slope solutions. Mismatched names make the path feel broken.
On phones, a long trail wraps or truncates. Put the parent first, not a novel. If you cannot explain the parent, the site's structure is the problem, not the crumb.
An example
A remodeler's bathroom page sat three levels down and the only way home was the logo. Adding a crumb from home to remodeling to bathrooms gave the spouse who was forwarded the link a way to see what else the company does, without calling to ask.
Questions we get asked
Do breadcrumbs help SEO?
They help people, and they reinforce which page belongs to which section. That is useful. They are not a ranking tactic on their own. Build them when the site has depth.
Are they the same as the URL?
They often mirror the URL path, and they do not have to. The crumb is the human path. The URL is the address. Keep them from contradicting each other.
