Why Breadcrumbs are not SEO Friendly for your Blog?

No one knew that a simple Breadcrumb used in the fairyTale of " Hansel and Gretel" would become a website element one day. Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation system used in websites that offer more usability to the visitor. They appear horizontally above Post titles or below headers. They show user location and tells him what post and which section of the blog category he is on. Breadcrumb provides links back to the pages the user already visited in hierarchical order. Often a colon ( : )or slash ( / ) or even a greater-than sign ( > ) is used as hierarchy separator.  These are now widely used by blog owners in both Wordpress and Blogger platforms. Unfortunately Breadcrumbs destroy the advantages of Permalinks which play great role in targeting rich keywords. Blogger Team has introduced permalinks on all blogspot blogs and we already discussed several ways of optimizing permalinks, now it's the right time to realize how Trailing links effect permalink display in SERPs.

Examples:

Typical breadcrumbs may look like this:

Homepage > Category Page > Sub Category Page

or

Home page / Section page / Subsection page

How BreadCrums Effect SERP Display?

Carefully look at the snapshot below. The first link pointed by red arrow is of our second blog (SEM) and the second link pointed by green is of our current blog (MBT). We are using Breadcrumb in SEM for the past few months  just as experimentation and the results I obtained were not satisfactory. Breadcrumbs is only replacing the permalink which contains our rich keywords and replaces it with the category/label name. As you can see in the snapshot below, instead of displaying keywords in the permalink, Googlebot is instead picking the category title ( i.e. Social Media)  and displaying it instead of the keywords used in URL structure.

Note:  I will surely delete Breadcrumb plugin from SEM as soon as I get time.

In MBT Googlebot is displaying the permalink (i.e. google-crawling...) instead of a label or category title because we use no Breadcrumb plugin in our blog. As a result we are getting extra benefit of exposing more keywords on Google search page, thus leading to a higher rank on search engine pages.

If you view any URL of Mashable or even SEOMoz in Google you will find that Google spiders are picking and displaying the permalink instead of the Category or tag title, because both these blogs are using no Breadcrumb plugins anywhere on there platforms.

Mashable:

SEOMOZ:

Both these two great blogs are making best possible use of keywords to rank higher on search pages to drive organic traffic. They both use no BreadCrum plugin for reasons we already discussed. Therefore you may avoid installing any such widget on your blogger blogs or any WP plugin at your wordpress blogs. Blogs have simple structure and the pages are not sorted too deep ( can go to a maximum of two-three trails) so such a plugin serves less in terms of both usability and Optimization.

When can you use Breadcrumbs?

If you have an Ecommerce site where you sell merchandise and the number of pages or categories are heavily tagged then you will for sure use breadcrumb to serve your visitors more. This is one reason why you see this plugin on Ecommerce sites like Ebay. Since Ebay has dozens of pages that are linked to one another via tags therefore a breadcrumb is necessary to keep the user informed about his location on the site.

Do you still want to add it in your blogs?

Though breadcrumb serves no logic in case of blogs but still if you like these trailing links then you can use the rel="noindex"   attribute to inform the robots not to index or crawl the links. This is one way the links will not be indexed and thus wont appear at all in search results page. This is the same logic applied by ebay folks:

Need Help?

If I sounded too technical then please post your queries so that I could help more precisely. I hope this post clears many doubts linked to this Rootline trails and might have given you enough help in deciding what is best for your blog. Peace and blessings pals! :)

Are you using Breadcrumbs on your blog? If yes then what action have you decided after reading todays tutorial? 

Source : mybloggertricks[dot]com

Difference - HTML and XHTML

When inserting codes into the Blogger template, page element, or blog post, you may have seen error messages that the code could not be parsed, was not well-formed, was broken, or that the elements were not closed properly. These errors can be corrected if you understand the rules that must be adhered to in XHTML documents. Blogger templates use the XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type. In this article, we shall explain some of the XHTML syntax or rules, so that you may troubleshoot and resolve the problems if these error messages should occur.

XML, HTML and XHTML

We shall keep this short. Just so as you understand what we said about document type, view the Page Source or Source of your Blogger blog. You should see this document type declaration at the very top:-

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

The terms – XML, HTML and XHTML - refer to the markup language used to write the web pages. Many of us would have heard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and used since the early days of internet. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a meta-language, used to create other markup languages. The traditional HTML was later recast to use the rules of XML and that resulted in a new XML application, called XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). Because XHTML rules are strict and unforgiving, not conforming to them when attempting to modify the template would result in error messages. So, what are these rules that Bloggers like us should take note of?

Basic Rules of XHTML

1. Codes to be in lowercase

Since XML is case sensitive, all the element keywords and attribute names used in XHTML should be in the lowercase. For example, the template code is not this:-

<TITLE>Tips for New Bloggers</TITLE>

but this:-

<title>Tips for New Bloggers</title>

If you have noticed, the elements and attribute names between the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs have to be in the lowercase. However, the value, which in this case is “Tips for New Bloggers”, can be in the uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case.

2. Attribute values to be in quotation marks

All the attribute values have to be enclosed either in single or double quotation marks. The following examples are not accepted by XHTML:-

<div id=header-wrapper> <a href=http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com>Text Link</a> <img src=photo.jpg/> <table width=200 border=0 cellpadding=2>

Instead, they should be written as such:-

<div > <a href="http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com">Text Link</a> <img src="photo.jpg"/> <table width="200" border="0" cellpadding="2">

3. Container elements must have closing tags

This is not correct:-

<p>A paragraph.

In XHTML, there must be a closing tag with a forward slash (/) at the end:-

<p>A paragraph.</p>

Examples of the many non-empty elements that have opening and corresponding closing tags are:-

<ul> ... </ul> <li> ... </li> <table> ... </table> <h2> ... </h2> <div> ... </div> <span> ... </span> <dt> ... </dt> <dd> ... </dd> <a href> ... </a>

4. Standalone elements to be closed

Some of the elements are empty or standalone. They do not have associated closing tags. Common examples are:-

<br> <img> <input> <frame> <hr> <meta> <link>

Nonetheless, in XHTML, these elements must be terminated or closed. There are two ways to do that. One way to terminate the element is to put a forward slash (/) at the end like this:-

<br/> <img/> <input/> <frame/> <hr/> <meta/> <link/>

The second way is to add a corresponding closing tag like this:-

<br> ... </br> <img> ... </img> <input> ... </input> <frame> ... </frame> <hr> ... </hr> <meta> ... </meta> <link> ... </link>

5. Elements to be properly nested

This means that elements must be closed in the reverse order. For example, this code is not accepted in XHTML:-

<form> <table> ... </form> </table>

It is improperly nested because the form was created first followed by the table. To close them in the proper order, the table must be closed before the form, like this:-

<form> <table> ... </table></form>

6. Document to have only one root element

In the XHTML document, you will see that except for the document type declaration, all the codes are nested between <html> and </html>. This is the root element and all other elements or sub elements are in between. The document structure will look like this:-

<html> <head> ... </head> <body> ... </body> </html>

7. Attribute minimization is not allowed

In XHTML, all attributes should be in the form name="value". Even if the value is the same as the name, it cannot be minimized to one word. Hence, in our Add Text Box and Textarea article, the textarea code is not this:-

<textarea readonly>Hyperlink Code</textarea>

but this:-

<textarea readonly="readonly">Hyperlink Code</textarea>

XHTML Character Entities

Quite a number of readers had asked why they were unable to display HTML codes in their blog posts or why their codes were not well-parsed when inserted into the template. If you have noticed by now, the codes are wrapped in the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs. The moment these are posted, they will be interpreted as codes and will trigger an action by the browser. Should you want to display these as part of the text, use their character entities instead.

"	"
&	&
<	<
>	>

The next time you see an error message to the effect that the code is not well formed, not well parsed, not properly closed, etc., take a look at this guide, troubleshoot the problem and try out the possible solutions.

©

Source : tips-for-new-bloggers[dot]blogspot[dot]com