what are breadcrumbs on a website

Breadcrumbs are a type of secondary navigation scheme that reveals the users location in a website or web application. They are a navigational aid that shows users where they are on a website and how they got there. The term comes from the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, where the kids drop a trail of breadcrumbs to trace their way back home. Breadcrumbs are usually placed at the top of a page, just below the main navigation bar, and contain a series of clickable links that represent the logical hierarchy of a user’s journey within a website. They are horizontally arranged text links separated by the “greater than” symbol (>), which indicates the level of that page relative to the page links beside it. Breadcrumbs are used primarily to give users a secondary means of navigating a website, and by offering a breadcrumb trail for all pages on a large multi-level website, users can navigate to higher-level categories more easily. Breadcrumbs make websites easier to use and navigate, and they benefit SEO by helping Google understand a sites hierarchy and distribute PageRank throughout the website.