Google recently rolled out a new feature that displays site hierarchies at the bottom of each search result. In case you missed it, you would see a green URL below the link and link text that shows you where you are headed, but the green URL has now been replaced with a hierarchy that shows the precise location of the page on the website.
This was great news for the Drupal community because Drupal generates these site hierarchies, or breadcrumbs, right out of the box. Google is now using these breadcrumbs in their SERPs to help searchers, and anyone using the breadcrumbs feature in Drupal’s core is benefiting from it.
Drupal also offers a sweet module called Custom Breadcrumbs 2 that allows you to further customize your breadcrumbs, maximizing their relevancy and cleanliness.
Custom Breadcrumbs 2
This module “allows its administrators to set up parametrized breadcrumb trails for any node type.” For example, this blog post can have breadcrumbs set up as “Home > Blog > 2009 > December” for CCK-style node types.
New features have been added to the Custom Breadcrumbs 2 release that includes support for views, panels, taxonomy vocabularies and terms, paths, and a simple API. That way you can enable breadcrumbs for contributed modules on module pages and theme templates, increasing overall visibility. Custom Breadcrumbs 2 also allows admin to use php code snippets in forming breadcrumb titles and paths.
There is a beta version of Custom Breadcrumbs 2 now available for testing at http://drupal.org/project/custom_breadcrumbs. All versions support multiple languages. There will also be a full Drupal 7 release of Custom Breadcrumbs 2. If you haven’t already, download and configure it in with your Drupal-powered site. It is easy and helps maximize your online path in Google results.
We are curious to know what other people feel about Drupal’s breadcrumbs. Are you using breadcrumbs for your Drupal site? Let us know about your experience with Drupal’s core breadcrumbs feature, or the Custom Breadcrumbs module below in a comment. Have you not jumped on the breadcrumbs bandwagon? Let us know below if you aren’t sold on the idea, or just want to know a little bit more.