Negative impact on SEO when mobile website version does not display full breadcrumb?

Question

We want to customize the mobile website view of an insurance provider. For space reasons we would like to display only the last part of the breadcrumb on the mobile website in the future. Before we do this, we have to ask ourselves whether there are potential disadvantages with regard to SEO if the breadcrumbs are displayed completely in the desktop version but only partially in the mobile version?

It would be great if someone could share their experiences, provide an official Google document or a relevant case study.

Answer 1

There is nothing in Google's official documentation that would imply negative impact on SEO if mobile site contains slightly different content i.e. breadcrumb links from its desktop equivalent. If however you're using the structured data for Breadcrumb then Google does recommend keeping structured data the same between your mobile and desktop sites: https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing

The most important thing to keep in mind is the fact that Google now primarily crawls the web with a mobile user-agent. So if your mobile site has "less" content, this can potentially negatively impact your SEO.

"If it’s your intention that the mobile page should have less content than the desktop page, you can expect some traffic loss when your site is enabled mobile-first indexing, since Google can't get as much information from your page as before." https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites/mobile-first-indexing

So my recommendation would be to match your mobile content, including breadcrumb links, to your desktop content.