Google Results Displaying Link Structure

[realcontent]

Question. On some keyword searches, google is displaying the site heirarchy like a breadcrumb navigation, instead of the url:

Like this:

Meta Title
Meta description
www.example.com › Home › Products > Product Types

Instead of:

Meta Title
Meta description
www.example.com/products/type.html

Anybody know anything about this? How and why does this happen, and how long have they been doing this? Thank you!

[tedster]

It started last fall - see Breadcrumb navigation included in results [webmasterworld.com]

Here is Google's announcement [googleblog.blogspot.com] and description of this change.

[HuskyPup]

As tedster says it's been around for a while now, I see it on my sites specifically on my Coppermine image galleries and my WordPress blogs but on my hand built pages I don't think I've ever seen it.

I'm guessing that it probably comes from the site map?

[realcontent]

Thank you all...yes, I'd be curious to know what triggers this, because on the site I am looking at, it only happens on certain pages.

[tedster]

It seems to be a pretty complex algo, from what I've seen so far. It helps to have your own breadcrumbs but that's no guarantee. It helps to have a clear Information Architecture on the site, but that's no guarantee. And it seems to help to show a directory structure in the URL, but again, that's no guarantee.

There also seems to be a query-dependent aspect to whether the breadcrumbs are shown or not. My guess? It's about Google's level of confidence for the particular URL that ranks from any site. If there are a lot of candidate pages on one site for that query, then you're more likely to see the breadcrumb links.