Google announced two more changes to its mobile search results last week, specifically to do with the way URL’s are displayed:
- The website name will be used instead of the domain name
- Instead of the page URL, a breadcrumb format will be displayed
So you can visualise what they mean, here are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ results:
The good news is you have control over the breadcrumb appearance using Schema. Google have yet to publish up-to-date instructions on how to implement this, but when they do they will be found here.
The second part of this change is to display “the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name.” So far this only affects mobile results in the USA. Google also specified some guidelines for the site name:
- Be reasonably similar to your domain name
- Be a natural name used to refer to the site, such as “Google,” rather than “Google, Inc.
- Be unique to your site — not used by some other site
- Not be a misleading description of your site
Here are their instructions on implementing this.
If you run your website on WordPress and have Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin installed, the good news is that version 2.1 has the site name functionality in place. And you can also implement breadcrumbs by following their instructions by editing the theme, although it’s probably worth requesting that the theme creator add this functionality so it doesn’t override on each theme update.
