Strange URLs in the search results

[superclown2]

Forgive me if this has been covered before but it's something I just noticed.

Some of the search results in my niche look unusual - they are all 'big brand' results.

At the top there is the usual blue clickable URL, there is then the snippet of content, then at the bottom in green, instead of the usual non-clickable URL there is something like:

www.megabrand.com › widgets › blue widgets

in which both 'widgets' and 'blue widgets' are clickable. The URLs to these begin with:

http://www.google.co.uk url?url=

Anyone got any idea just what's going on?

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 9:06 pm (utc) on May 23, 2011]
[edit reason] delinked google.co.uk url example [/edit]

[Robert Charlton]

Your question makes me think of this recent discussion....

SERPS show 2 words from breadcrumbs & url only - no content or cache
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4315019.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Is what you're seeing the same or similar?

[superclown2]

Nope. The search results looks absolutely normal apart from the strange URLs at the botton, and there are the usual 'cached' and 'similar' links at the end.

[tedster]

Breadcrumb links at the bottom of the snippet, a.k.a. "site heirarchies", were introduced in 2009 - and they are gradually becoming more widespread. See our thread: Breadcrumb navigation included in results [webmasterworld.com]

I believe the Google URL you are seeing attached to each bit of the breadcrumb trail is a tracking code redirect, so Google can easily measure whether and how the search public uses this feature.