Schema piece - Breadcrumb

This documentation is subject to change. See "Notes on previous and future approaches".

Describes the hierarchical position a WebPage within a WebSite.

Triggers

Should be added as top-level node in the graph, on all public pages which have a valid WebPage, except for 4xx and 5xx range error pages/scenarios.

Required properties

A valid BreadcrumbList must have the following properties.

  • @type: BreadcrumbList.
  • @id: The site's home URL appended by #/schema/BreadcrumbList/{{ID}}, where {{ID}} is a unique identifier for the 'parent' webpage.
  • itemListElement: An array of ListItem objects, representing the position of the current page in the site hierarchy, each with the following properties:
    • position: An integer (starting at 1), counting the 'depth' of the page from (including) the homepage.
    • name: The name of the page in question, as it appears in the breadcrumb navigation.
    • item: The unmodified canonical URL of the page in question.

Also note that:

  • Paginated states should not be included/represented in the list.
  • The final/current 'crumb' should omit the item property.

Failure scenarios

If any of the required fields are missing or invalid, the node should not be output.

If the node is not output, any entities which would otherwise have declared a relationship with the BreadcrumbList should remove those references.

Examples

Minimum criteria

{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@graph": [
{
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/BreadcrumbList/abc123",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"name": "Home",
"item": "https://www.example.com/"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 2,
"name": "Example Section",
"item": "https://www.example.com/example-section/"
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 3,
"name": "Example Page"
}
]
}
]
}

Notes on previous and future approaches

Previous implementations have used more verbose markup to describe each 'item'; however, this has been temporarily simplified in order to work around various parsing problems exhibited by Google. We may reintroduce more detail here in the future.

Previous approach

Each item, except for the final/current 'crumb', had the following properties:

  • @id: The unmodified canonical URL of the page in question.
  • url: The unmodified canonical URL of the page in question.
  • name: The name of the page in question, as it appears in the breadcrumb navigation.

Additionally:

  • The item representing the current WebPage omitted all properties except for @id.

Previous schema markup:

{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@graph": [
{
"@type": "BreadcrumbList",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/#/schema/BreadcrumbList/abc123",
"itemListElement": [
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 1,
"item": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/",
"url": "https://www.example.com/",
"name": "Home"
}
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 2,
"item": {
"@type": "WebPage",
"@id": "https://www.example.com/example-section/",
"url": "https://www.example.com/example-section/",
"name": "Example page"
}
},
{
"@type": "ListItem",
"position": 3,
"item": {
"@id": "https://www.example.com/example-section/example-page/"
}
}
]
}
]
}
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