Breadcrumb data included in JSON-LD for SEO

By Ilana Davis

By popular request, JSON-LD for SEO now has the option to include BreadcrumbList structured data.

Breadcrumb structured data should be included and maintained by your theme. This ensures the breadcrumbs match exactly how your theme codes your URLs. Enabling breadcrumb structured data should be done with caution. Using the wrong URL structure can hurt your SEO if they aren't done in the exact same way as your theme coded the URLs.

For that reason, JSON-LD for SEO does not include breadcrumb data automatically.

With recent changes in Google, the benefits of breadcrumbs are diminished. Google's algorithm is able to figure things out from the URLs and visually those automatic results look nearly identical to actual Breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumb settings in JSON-LD for SEO

You can enable breadcrumb data for both blogs and products.

Optional breadcrumb settings in JSON-LD for SEO for blogpost and products.

When selecting the product breadcrumbs, make sure you select the correct URL structure for your theme. Your options include:

  • Disabled: No product breadcrumbs
  • Product only: Home -> Product
  • Collection and Product: Home -> Collection -> Product

If you select Collection and Product but you do not have collection-aware URLs, that's ok. If a collection URL is not detected, we'll fall back to the product URL breadcrumb.

Collection aware URL: /collections/mens-watches/products/example-1234

Product only URL: /products/example-1234

Testing your breadcrumb data

Once you've saved the breadcrumb settings in JSON-LD for SEO, visit a product or blog post to test the URLs in the Rich Results Testing Tool.

You can see a demo of what this looks like on the JSON-LD for SEO demo site for products and blog posts.

JSON-LD for SEO

Get more organic search traffic from Google without having to fight for better rankings by utilizing search enhancements called Rich Results.

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