What are breadcrumbs and do they help SEO?

Breadcrumbs are the trail of links on a page, like Home › Women › Dresses, that shows where the page sits in your store. They give shoppers a one-click way up to a broader category, and published as BreadcrumbList structured data they can help Google show that path in search results instead of a raw web address.

What they are

A breadcrumb trail starts at Home and steps down through each category to the page the shopper is on. Every step except the last is a link. On a product page it answers two questions at a glance: what kind of product this is, and where to find more like it.

How they help shoppers

• Fewer dead ends: every product links up into its category, so a shopper who lands on the wrong product can move up a level instead of leaving.

• Orientation: shoppers arriving from search or an ad see straight away which part of your store they're in.

• Faster browsing: stepping back to a parent category takes one click, with no need for the menu or search.

How they help search engines

The trail's links tell search engines how your catalogue is organised: which collections sit inside which, and which products belong to each. The same path can also be published as BreadcrumbList structured data, which Google can use to show a clean category path in a search result.

Search engines decide for themselves when and how to show rich results, so a breadcrumb path in your listing isn't guaranteed. Structured data makes your store eligible; it doesn't force the display.

How Breadcrumbs adds them

• Arrange your collections into a category tree in the Tree editor.

• Add the Breadcrumbs by Shopgears block to your product, collection and collection list templates in the theme editor.

• Switch on the Breadcrumb type in SEO schema. Its structured data is output by the same block, on every plan, including the free one.

There is no theme code to write, and the trail is drawn by your theme from data already on the page, so it doesn't slow your store down.