It’s always surprising to see such questions, but not out of the ordinary.
An SEO professional was wondering about breadcrumbs and if they do them in a certain way, will they incur a penalty?
Their question to John was: what if they don’t set the breadcrumb list in the list element, but they set it as normal anchor text, and then they use the breadcrumb list structured data on the page?
Is there a problem with doing this and will they get a penalty or manual action?
John answered that splitting up the breadcrumb pieces and marking some of them up with structured data and some of them with a direct link on the page is usually fine.
When it comes to structured data, Google’s algorithms try to recognize what is visible on the page versus what is just marked up for structured data.
Then they want to make sure that the data is physically visible on the page. Whether the elements are linked or not, this is fine.
John does not believe that the webspam team would watch out for something like this for a manual action, anyway.
The fear of being penalized for marking up breadcrumbs wrong, just totally forget about that.
That’s not something he would worry about.
Instead, he would try and see how breadcrumbs work on your pages, and how you can mark them all up properly.
Test the markup, and see how they look in the search results.
If you are happy with the way that they’re displayed on Google, then that’s perfectly fine.
He also reiterated not to worry about the webspam team taking action on a website for marking up breadcrumbs incorrectly.
This happens at approximately the 39:17 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 39:17
I’m curious about breadcrumbs. What if I don’t set the breadcrumb list in the list element, but set it as normal anchor text, and then I use the breadcrumb list structured data on the page? Is there any problem or chance that my site will get a manual action?
John (Answer) 39:32
I don’t know exactly what you’re trying to do with the breadcrumb markup there. But it sounds like you’re kind of like splitting up the breadcrumb pieces and marking some of them up with structured data and some of them with a direct link on the page.
And usually that’s fine. When it comes to structured data, our algorithms try to recognize what is visible on the page versus what you just have marked up for structured data. And we want to make sure that the structured data is actually visible on the page.
If some of these elements are linked as well on the page or not linked, that’s usually fine. When it comes to breadcrumbs in particular, I don’t think the webspam team would watch out for this and do any kind of manual actions anyway.
So that fear of being penalized for marking up breadcrumbs wrong, you can totally forget about that. That’s not something I would worry about. I would try to see how breadcrumbs work on your pages, how you can mark them up properly, test things out, see how they look in the search results.
And if you’re happy with how they look, that’s, that’s like perfectly fine. I would not worry about the webspam team taking action on a website for marking up breadcrumbs incorrectly, because there’s just so many bigger problems to worry about on the web.
