Breadcrumbs and Left hand menus....

[Bio-RadAbs]

I wanted to know some opinions on breadcrumbs and left hand menus on a page. Take a traditional two column page, you have the left hand navigation on the left, and page copy on the right.

The introduction of breadcrumbs serves two things

• Navigation for the user, shows structurally how the page fits
• SEO benefit - include breadcrumbs, use schema and you potentially provided more page links on a single search result.

1. Thinking about this, isn't the left hand navigation and breadcrumbs the same? The left hand navigation shows where the page fits, which is precisely what the breadcrumbs do.
2. You are doubling the links, left hand menu and breadcrumbs
3. Sure you can get rid of the breadcrumbs, but from an SEO stand point, won't you lose the ability to have breadcrumbs via schema on search results
4. Do you see breadcrumbs and menu differently, should breadcrumbs only exist on single column pages (say an ecommerce page) and left hand menu on two column pages like an article page?

Thoughts?

[Highland]

Depends a lot on how you configure your site. If your site isn't deep (meaning the number of pages to navigate to a given page) then breadcrumbs don't make as much sense. If you use broad categories with a drill-down into increasingly specific categories before you reach a given content page, however, then it makes a lot more sense to offer breadcrumbs, The purpose of breadcrumbs is to show the navigation path to that page.

I wouldn't worry about the duplicate links. A site may link to a page internally multiple times. Internal links are not counted as votes like external links are.