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Help! Same url breadcrumbs in Google Search results for Desktop

         

mike890

5:50 pm on Mar 10, 2022 (gmt 0)



The same URL breadcrumbs are displayed in the Google search results for all the individual pages from the site.
I have double-checked sitemap.xml, meta urls and breadcrumbs and can't find the problem. It's only happening on desktop search and not mobile.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

not2easy

6:46 pm on Mar 10, 2022 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Hi mike890 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Was it different yesterday? Were any changes made to your site since the time it was showing more accurate breadcrumbs? Or were no breadcrumbs showing previously? In other words, has your site always shown breadcrumbs or was something changed to begin showing breadcrumbs?

Wilburforce

8:05 pm on Mar 10, 2022 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Your question reads as if breadcrumbs are not part of the page, but are created dynamically - I can't see another way this could happen.

Have you checked how Google renders the desktop version of each page in GSC? If there is no problem there, and the pages also render correctly in all desktop browsers, then Google Search is more likely to be the culprit than your source code, but it would still be worth checking that. It is also worth asking why Google Search might have selected that breadcumb version, rather than any other, as (and see below) it looks strangely as if the version displayed in Search has in some way been takes as the canonical one.

Finally - following not2easy's questions - has anything changed recently either in your site or in Google Search? If, for example, you have replaced static breadcrumbs with dynamic ones (or vice-versa), there will be a discrepancy between spidered/cached versions of your pages and live/refreshed versions. It might be worth putting "<meta http-equiv="Cache-control" content="no-cache"> in the headers of a couple of pages, waiting for Google to spider them - you can try prompting Google to do this by fetching them in GSC - and seeing whether that clears the problem in those pages. You could do it globally using .htaccess (Header set Cache-Control "no-cache", or Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, public"), but I'd personally do it in headers so you can compare pages.