How do I get Google to show links to my site hierarchy in search results?

Question

I have recently noticed that for some websites, Google is linking to different locations in the site hierarchy instead of just the destination page URL. For instance, searching for "Malibu Rum Drink Recipes" results in an entry at Bar None Drinks that shows the following:

Drink recipes containing Malibu Rum
Choose from our collection of great drinks made with Malibu Rum.
www.barnonedrinks.com > Drinks > By Ingredient > M

Each of the individual segments between the ">" marks are clickable and take you to that section of the site.

How do I get Google to show this for my site?

Answer 1

Breadcrumbs.

There is little official information available, but it seems that if you put navigational breadcrumbs on your site's pages (the kind that shows the user where he is within your site's hierarchy), the Google bot will pick up the information from there.

From their original announcement:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you'll see a series of similar links at the top, "Home> Toys & Games> Robots." These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called "breadcrumbs," which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we've been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

If you're looking in implementing breadcrumbs for your site, check out this Best Practices research from LBi: SEO breadcrumbs for site hierarchies in Google

Answer 2

Google now supports breadcrumb markup: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/rich-snippets-testing-tool-improvements.html

Answer 3

This YouTube Matt Cutts video "Why aren't breadcrumbs displaying in search results for my site?" may help you out.