<b>BreadcrumbList: the one-property mistake breaking half your trails</b>

<b>BreadcrumbList: the one-property mistake breaking half your trails</b>

Breadcrumb rich results are among Google's most stable and most quietly broken features. The single most common failure sources see: a non-sequential or zero-indexed <code>position</code>.

The spec is unambiguous — <code>position</code> in a <code>BreadcrumbList</code> starts at 1 and must increment with no gaps. Off-by-one from a templating loop, or a missing <code>item</code>/<code>name</code> on the final crumb (the current page, which can omit the URL but not the name), silently kills the whole trail.

What it means for you — run your category and product templates through the Rich Results Test and confirm positions read 1, 2, 3 with no skips. Watch this: breadcrumbs increasingly replace the green URL in mobile SERPs, so a broken trail is real lost real estate.