<b>Your breadcrumbs are doing nothing for rankings. Fight me.</b>

<b>Your breadcrumbs are doing nothing for rankings. Fight me.</b>

Everyone treats breadcrumbs like a ranking lever. They're not. They're a navigation pattern that happens to throw off a little structured-data garnish.

Here's the problem: every breadcrumb on a category page points <i>up</i> the tree. You're funneling equity toward pages that already have ten other links pointing at them — homepage, category, parent. Your money pages, the deep ones, get nothing back.

Breadcrumbs are great for users and for the rich result. As a link-equity tool they're a rounding error you've convinced yourself matters.

Am I wrong, or are you just attached to the snippet?