Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in ResultsGet Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results

By Chris Crum

Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

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The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

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Avast Software Added To Google Pack

By Doug Caverly

At least in certain parts of the world, Google has revised its approach to connecting people with security products.  Avast Free Antivirus is now included in eight different versions of the Google Pack bundle of software.

Try to download Google Pack in Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish, and you’ll see Avast’s logo among symbols for Chrome, Google Earth, Picasa, and a handful of other things.  This endorsement should help Avast Free Antivirus Version 5 find its way onto more than a few new computers.

Of course, the odd thing is that Spyware Doctor with Anti-Virus, and not Avast’s product, is still recommended to anyone who takes a look at Google Pack in English.  Whether this is because the change is experimental or Google’s been caught mid-rollout is hard to say.

Or perhaps Google’s just really trying to split hairs with regards to what security software is most effective in different markets.

It’s likely that the adjustment represents some form of payback, though.  Alex Chitu, who wrote about it, also noted, “In December, Avast’s blog announced that the software will offer users the option to install Google Chrome.”

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Email Not Just Alive, But Use Increasing

ExactTarget released some new findings today about email use, finding that it is increasing, with social media and smartphones playing key roles.

Social media replacing email has become a hot topic. WebProNews ran an article on the topic recently, as something of a response to a recent Wall Street Journal piece, which seemed to declare email all but dead. We took the opposite stance, and so does ExactTarget’s research.

“The total number of social media users is rapidly increasing, but often these users jump in quickly, only to curtail their use of social media over time,” said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget’s director of research and strategy. “Email on the other hand, is woven into all online interaction, making it an essential tool that consumers continue to use more and more.”

“Nearly 40 percent of students use smartphones and two-thirds of those use email,” said Mike Hanley, director of the Institute for Mobile Media Research in the study. “The increased use of mobile email is significant because it reverses the five-year trend of declining email use among college students.”

ExactTarget notes that while email is here to stay, the channel is presented with some challenges, such as those that stem from increased volume and consumer’s adoption of multichannel messaging.  The firm names two tactics that marketers should implement to drive continued email success:

– To break through consumers’ inbox clutter, marketers should deliver timely, relevant and personalized emails to consumers

– Due to consumers’ increasing receptivity to promotional messages via text, marketers should develop mobile messaging strategies.

Where do you stand in the email debate? Feel free to leave your comments below, or join the existing conversation on the topic over here.

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