Google is currently trialling a change to the way that it presents some URLs in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so that instead of showing a URL, it shows the breadcrumb navigation for that page:
Breadcrumbs appearing in search
For sites that have difficult to change, and sometimes ugly URLs that are not optimisable, this presents a big step forward for Google, as it allows for something more useful to be displayed in the URL area of the SERP than a long query string.
As well as this, if the result on for the site on that particular site isn’t quite right, but someone is interested in looking in a related category on the way to this page, Google have now made it easier to click directly to another area of the website, much like a sitelink performs for a website. However, it isn’t all that clear that these additional breadcrumb links are clickable without hovering the cursor over the link to that page.
Google have said that they have done this to provide more useful information about the page in the SERP. You can tell from this about some of the categories that may appear on a website, allowing a user to determine if that site is relevant to what they have originally searched for, and lets you know how a website would categorise what you are looking for.
URLs themselves are not always as good at giving that information to a user before they click on this link, and this new system should help to improve this, providing a good site structure is in place with proper breadcrumb navigation.
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