Navigation showing a page’s place within a website’s hierarchy (e.g. Home > Services > Plumbing > Water Heaters).
Breadcrumbs are a compact navigation trail showing how a page fits within a site’s organization. A trail such as Home, Resources, SEO Glossary, Indexing gives readers a way to understand the context and return to a broader section. It is different from the browser’s history of pages a person happened to visit.
The useful hierarchy does not have to mirror the URL’s folder structure. A term page at a flat root URL can still belong under a glossary hub in its breadcrumb trail. Choose the relationship that helps someone navigate the content, rather than derive every label mechanically from pieces of the address.
Visible breadcrumbs and breadcrumb structured data are related but separate implementations. The visible links help readers; machine-readable markup describes the trail for supporting systems. Adding structured data is not a promise that every search result will show the trail. Both versions should describe the same meaningful relationship and point to the intended pages.
Takeaway: Use breadcrumbs to help people return from a detailed page to the relevant hub or category. Keep the labels understandable even when your URL structure is flat.
Example
A business glossary uses /indexing/ for an individual term and /seo-glossary/ for its directory. The term page can show Home > SEO Glossary > Indexing without moving the term into a nested URL. The hub link provides useful navigation while the address remains unchanged.
What to check
Check that each linked ancestor exists and that the trail reflects the page’s real place in the site. Avoid adding duplicate breadcrumb components or contradictory markup from multiple tools. Validate structured data separately from testing the visible links.
For more detail, see Breadcrumb structured data.