Google Officially Drops URLs In Mobile Search Results For Site Name & Breadcrumbs

Apr 17, 2015 - 8:21 am 11 by

Google Mobile UXGoogle announced last night that the mobile search results are no longer going to display the site's URL in the search snippet, instead it will display the Site Name when it is able to and the breadcrumb navigation of the page it is on.

Google says this is a "better presentation" of the pages you will be able to click on. Google said they are actually "updating the algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format."

Here is the before and after:

Google Url Domain Replacement Before

The Site Name feature is currently only supported in the US and you can help Google determine the name of your site by using this schema. The breadcrumb is currently worldwide and that too can be communicated to Google using this schema.

I should note, the desktop results sometimes also show breadcrumbs. In fact, they use to be clickable until someone was able to hack the breadcrumbs and since then they have yet to return to clickable links.

The first time Google started using breadcrumbs in the snippets was back in 2009.

Both Danny Sullivan and Rand Fishkin dislike the new look, I feel the same:

Forum discussion at Google+.

 

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