Matt Cutts on Multiple Breadcrumbs on the Page

[ganeshjacharya]

Matt Cutts said

if it’s in a few spots, two or three or four, it doesn’t hurt to have those other breadcrumbs on the page

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXEYryd3eAY [youtube.com]

What can happen if there are more than 5? Can there be practical reasons where breadcrumbs may need to be placed over 5 or more places?

[edited by: aakk9999 at 3:18 pm (utc) on Mar 23, 2014]
[edit reason] Fixed link [/edit]

[aakk9999]

To put the above in the context, what Matt said before and after your quoted text is:

If you do have the taxonomy, the category, the hierarchy and it is already there and it is not like 20 different spots within your categories, if it is in few spots, 2 or 3 or 4 or something like that, it does not hurt to have these other breadcrumbs on your page. We will take the first one, this is our current behaviour and then we might be able to do a little bit of deeper understanding over the time about the overall structure of your site.

You ask:

Can there be practical reasons where breadcrumbs may need to be placed over 5 or more places?

What Matt talks about is the case where one page (e.g. one product page) has multiple rows of breadcrumbs - indicating that the product the page is about belongs to multiple structures. What he is saying is that if the item belongs to twenty structures, it could be odd. But that belonging to two, three, four could be OK.

But I would think on users here - having even 4 lines of breadcrumbs on the page can be confusing. If I have an item that belongs to multiple categories, I would usually pick one of them to show as breadcrumbs and show the user different taxonomy in some other way.

[Zivush]

I see the problem with breadcrumb in another aspect -
Adding breadcrumb makes multiple links to the main site's pages (home, section/index/category pages) as some of these links are already located in the heading part of many sites and some other locations on a page.

Thus, I don't know how Google treats having multiple links to the same destination on a single page. I think it can hurt in one way or another but I am not sure.
Any thoughts?