Should we use Breadcrumbs if a Website has a plain URL Structure?
If someone restructured his website to make it less convoluted due to many subpages. Since the site is now pretty straightforward, but not sure if including breadcrumb navigation is still necessary. There are two aspects here. The question focuses on the user experience side, which is something definitely to think about, But purely from an SEO point of view, there are two aspects. On the one hand, need to be able to crawl the website, so need to be able to find links to the different parts of the website. If there is this kind of cross-linking happening naturally within the website, especially if it’s a smaller website now, then that’s perfectly fine. Someone doesn’t need to add extra breadcrumb links to make the website interlinked a little bit better.
The other aspect is the UI that shows in the search results, it’s something that is seeing more often. Google doesn’t show the URL in the search result, but rather tries to show some kind of breadcrumb navigation for that individual page. So essentially, try to show some breadcrumb navigation in the search results for individual pages, and you can do that with the breadcrumb structured data. So for a smaller site, maybe that’s not as critical, but it’s a nice way to give some sense of structure for users when they’re searching and finding your pages in the search results.
Those are the primary aspects there, and if you feel you don’t need breadcrumbs from a UI point of view, and you’re sure that the internal linking works well within your website and you can test this with the various crawling tools that are out there. If you look at the search results pages, and you’re saying, well, these look OK to me, then we don’t think you need to add any breadcrumb navigation on top of that and near the author profile. On the other hand, if you’re saying the internal linking is not that great, or you would like to have these clear breadcrumbs in the search results, then adding the breadcrumb structure data seems like a good move.
A similar question was asked to John Mueller on Google office hours:
