Is Removing Breadcrumbs Detrimental for SEO?

[AliMac26]

We have full navigational breadcrumbs on our site for the menu and the brand menu.

i.e. Home > Clothing > Jackets

Brand > Brand Name > Brand Jackets

There's been talk of removing this and having it like Chico's does, where on item pages they just have a link at the top to previous category (i.e. you're on a shirt product page and at the top it says "Back to Tops" instead of listing Home > Clothing > Tops)

Is doing something like this detrimental to SEO? From what I've read Breadcrumbs are for user experience but I just want to be sure.

[brianglassman]

I would probably want to dig a bit deeper on why your team feels there's a need to remove breadcrumbs. From what I can see on the Chico's website, they do indeed use them: https://www.chicos.com/store/category/sweaters/cat8319278/

As well as proper structured markup: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/#url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chicos.com%2Fstore%2Fcategory%2Fsweaters%2Fcat8319278%2F

To address your question more directly:

Properly marked-up breadcrumbs add another layer of meaning and organizational depth to your website, which is parsed by search engines and weighed when organizing SERPs. While I can't assume the direct impact their removal would have on your organic traffic, I would hesitate to "downgrade" your site in terms of semantic markup.

This sounds like to me like the issue could be less to do with the breadcrumbs themselves, but instead a styling (breadcrumbs too distracting/prominent), or an architectural issue (breadcrumbs list too long).

More helpful information on breadcrumbs and proper markup/structured data: https://audisto.com/insights/guides/2/

Hope this helps.

-Brian