Low number of Valid items in Breadcrumbs

[amiromidi]

Hi again, and thanks in advance for spending your valuable time reading this thread.

We have more than 500 pages with distinct breadcrumbs each, however in GSC there are 13 valid items and zero invalid items!

Is it normal?

[MrSnuts]

Not sure if that's "normal", but we are having a very similar situation with only <10% of our breadcrumbs appearing in GSC.
I've stopped wondering about that a while ago tbh.

[amiromidi]

MrSnuts, good to know we are not alone ;)

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I find breadcrumbs useful on deep sites with lots of categories and a complex URL structure. On small sites with pages like example.com/awesome-article-title where the structure is simple they don't seem very useful.

I have 100% breadcrumb inclusion in search console for a larger more complicated site and less than 25% on a simple site.... perhaps usefulness plays a role? I no longer worry about it.

[amiromidi]

Sgt Kickaxe, thanks for sharing your story, however, our website has more than 35k pages without any search params, and if including params, it would be more than 5M page, I dont know if we should call our site simple or complicated; Currently, on purpose we have only 800 pages indexed and for every each of them, G shows their breadcrumbs properly when we inspect them. but when it comes to listing them in valid items section, we can see only 13 valid items (zero invalid), It's weird ...

[tangor]

G these days is about content and relevance. Not breadcrumbs. I'd look at the pages and conversions before looking at that.

[amiromidi]

Tangor, when you are head to head in competition with your rivals, breadcrumbs, structured data, video type ... all of them ARE seriously important.

[tangor]

Breadcrumbs are navigation, not content.

YMMV!

[amiromidi]

don't take my word, please google it : "Benefits of Using Breadcrumbs for SEO"

a sample:
According to Google, they use breadcrumbs to categorize and contextualize content.
Back in 2018, Google added breadcrumbs to the results pages, making them even more important than ever.
A recent case study found that implementing breadcrumbs helped them crack the top 10 results in Google.

[tangor]

For fun I did as asked. The many "benefits" all relate to navigation, which g and others already understand. It is quite possible that the keywords in your breadcrumbs ("x" v "13 valid") could indicate that g simply does not think the rest of the breadcrumbs are all that useful.

Not sure how many sites actually use breadcrumbs, I don't see them very often myself, but sites that don't have them seem to do okay without them. Even the articles found indicated the seo "benefits" are marginal if a site has a logical hierarchy---and all pages can be indexed without duplicate, etc.

breadcrumbs are not content. Marginally helpful in some cases for seo, but are still not content or relevance. Overstuffing for keywords will lead to penalties, so that is something to keep in mind.

[amiromidi]

no argue my friend, no one said breadcrumbs are content, you said, quote: "G these days is about content and relevance. Not breadcrumbs."
I replied they are important a lot for SEO when completion is high

[tangor]

In which case we agree more than we disagree!

Still remains navigation, though will grant that "some" SEO regarding "keywords" embedded in breadcrumbs MIGHT have some benefit. Particularly if your competitors are also breadcrumbers. :)

Personally? Have done both. Sites with/without and never found a MARKED difference between them. While small code to implement, breadcrumbs do add to the page size and ultimately---my experience---a few pico seconds of time to load pays off a bit better. Merely remarking that out of "800" only "13" are valid seems to indicate that g is not giving that much seo value for breadcrumbs for 35k pages with 5m permutations.

There's other ways to get to the top spot than focusing on non-content.

[amiromidi]

we agree mostly
believe me or not, there is a known website among our competition, who is cheating with Breadcrumbs "WHITOUT ANY PROPERP CONTENT" , we reported that site many time times to G , but ....