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Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.

Do your site’s breadcrumbs show up in Google’s results? Comment here.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its "semantic" period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Update: In the comments, one reader says:

My site breadcrumb is seperated by |. Somehow, Google seems to put the > character in of their own accord. I’ve seen many results with breadcrumbs in the SERPS, and I havn’t seen any with a seperating character other than >. I do think Google puts in the > character regardless of your site’s seperating delimiter.

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

Local search is only one sliver of the search marketing game, but it is an increasingly important one, and one that is changing rapidly. These days people are going to the web to find local businesses, sometimes more than even the phone book. Having a presence in local search is imperative for any small business, but just as imperative is being able to compete for visibility.

There is a good discussion taking place in our WebProWorld forum on the topic of local search. If you have any insight, you can contribute there or comment on this article for other WebProNews readers to see.

There are a lot of variables to consider when mapping out (no pun intended) your local search marketing efforts. Jeff Howard at Search Engine Guide has a very informative piece about such variables that search engines, and Google specifically employ when returning local search results to users.

"They have variables such as size of the map, and definition of a region’s center that combine with trust, a citation, or sometimes what I call ’sureness factors’ to determine what businesses should be recommended," he says. More specifically, the variables Howard is talking about are:

1. The size of the area as defined by the keyword search, or map space being viewed.

2. Google’s sureness that in fact there is a business at the listed address doing what it says.

3. How Google defines the region’s center, either by keyword or map parameters like zoom level.

Howard goes into some quite interesting examples of the variables at work.

It’s not just about how the search engines define local results though. Businesses should also take into account how users/customers define them. Your business may be so many miles away from a user’s location, but other variables can factor into this as well. Neighborhoods may matter to users. Obstacles like rivers, for example, may matter. Maponics CEO Darrin Clement made some good points on this subject in a recent interview with WebProNews:

As it stands right now, there are a number of measures businesses can take to help users find them in local search. Howard offers the following tips to let Google and other mapping search engines know where you’re located:

- Have your address listed with major data providers.
- Claim your listing at the local business center.
- Have reviews either at Google or elsewhere.
- List your business in the proper categories once it’s been claimed.

Search specialist Bruce Clay recently shared some further local search tips in another WebProNews interview (below). One particularly important tip he shared involved getting local people to link to your content. It helps if you have content that is actually localized.

Bruce also aimed to debunk some local SEO myths in that interview, and one of those is that local SEO is cheaper than SEO on a broader scale. He basically noted that just because a site’s target audience is smaller, SEO is still SEO, and essentially the same work is involved when it comes to fixing a site and optimizing it. That’s just something to keep in mind.

That said, SEO may still be SEO when it comes to the effort that goes into it, but just because your site is optimized well for regular search, does not mean that your local search presence should take a back seat. Even if your site ranks well organically, Google may be pushing it further down the page, simply because of the search engine’s use of Universal search, which for many queries that yield local results, will simply return a set of local results, which are often near the top of the listings. This is pulled from a separate index. This topic was discussed in a quite interesting interview we had with Brian Combs, who founded local SEO firm ionadas local.

The new redesign of search results pages that Google has been testing could have important implications for local search. As some have pointed out, the interface involved with this redesign alters the presentation of local universal results. It only shows five results as opposed to the seven that Google currently shows.

"In the new UI, the map is now wider, the local listings are shown below the Map and an obvious pin to a Map centric view is visible along the left menu," notes local search blogger Mike Blumenthal. "In an of itself, the change means more SEO competition for fewer spots. Whether the change will drive more people into Maps is unclear as highlighted Map pin is offset by fewer links into Maps."

He also provides an interesting look at what this possible new interface could mean in connection with Google’s local listing ads for businesses that the company is also testing.

Doing well in local search means much more than simply having a listing in Google Maps. Local search is a competitive and increasingly critical space of the web that local businesses need to take seriously. Take into account the rise of the mobile web, which is only going to greatly increase in consumer use, and local plays that much more of a role in getting customers to your business.

How much emphasis do you place on your local search marketing efforts? Are you seeing the benefits? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> New Google Home Page: Does it Remove or Add Distraction?

> Yahoo Deepens Integration With Facebook

> Google Aims to Put the "Friend" in Friend Connect

Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters "RT" to somebody else’s tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. "Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting," says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

As a Twitter user, what is your opinion of the concept of retweeting? Share with WebProNews readers.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called " Project Retweet," which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

 But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the "like" feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook "like," a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your "likes" on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be "noise" on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old "content is king" cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole "Retweet vs. Like" concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

What are your thoughts on retweeting? Do you see value in it or is it just noise? Tell us what you think.

Retweeting is a phenomenon that has taken the Twitter world by storm. The concept began when somebody added the letters "RT" to somebody else’s tweet and posted it as their own. The idea caught on on a massive scale, and now there are services that utilize retweeting as the backdrop of their entire purposes. "Some of Twitter’s best features are emergent—people inventing simple but creative ways to share, discover, and communicate. One such convention is retweeting," says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

As a Twitter user, what is your opinion of the concept of retweeting? Share with WebProNews readers.

Disclaimer: If you are not a Twitterer, you may be unfamiliar with the concept of retweeting. Basically, when someone updates their status on Twitter, that is called a tweet. When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at "RT" (for ReTweet) and the user’s name typically and post the same update. This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure.

Tweetmeme has been around for a while, offering a service to content providers, where they can add a button onto an article page that lets a reader easily tweet a link to that article on Twitter. It then counts these tweets, which become retweets, just like similar buttons you’ve probably seen for Digg. The more retweets that are registered on that button, the more interesting the content looks at first glance. The reason for this is that theoretically, if a user sees the article has 2,000 tweets, as opposed to 2, they can assume that a lot of people found the article interesting or informative, and will be more likely to continue reading. It’s kind of like the concept behind comments. Articles that display a large amount of comments are likely to catch readers’ eyes for the same reason. The Huffington Post discussed this concept in a recent interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

This week, a company called Mesiab Labs launched a service that is practically identical to Tweetmeme, at Retweet.com. Obviously, this company is hoping to cash in on the popular concept, while injecting a powerful brand to go along with it. The timing of this is interesting because Twitter recently announced its own retweeting plans in an initiative called " Project Retweet," which will presumably see a retweet button at Twitter.com (many consider this long overdue), and retweet functionality right in the Twitter API, opening up a lot more retweeting possibilities in third-party Twitter apps.

Sketch for Project Retweet

 But back to why retweeting is useful to businesses. The attention grabbing effect of the retweet button on a piece of content is just one aspect. Another is of course, the promotion the content provider sees from a substantial amount of retweets. They’re viral by nature, and in the best-case scenario, they can drive a ton of traffic to the content.

Famed blogger Robert Scoble started an interesting discussion on FriendFeed about what is better between the retweet and the "like" feature on either Facebook or FriendFeed itself. While I’m not going to get into all of the reasons why one is better than the other, Scoble and other participants in the conversation made a number of good points bout the pros and cons of retweets. Let’s look at some of those.

Pros

- Retweets are viral

- Retweets show up as top-level items in FriendFeed

- As opposed to a Facebook "like," a retweet is shared with everyone

- Retweets typically give credit to sources

- While giving credit to sources, retweets can lead to relationships

- Susbstantial amounts of retweets can say a lot about the quality of content

- Retweets can inspire further conversation

- Retweets can be good for branding

- Retweets can easily be shared across multiple networks, like Twitter, Friend, Facebook, etc.

- Retweets can provide followers with additional value in quality content

Cons

- It’s hard to provide a list of the things you’ve retweeted, as Scoble mentions. He mentions how people can see your "likes" on FriendFeed

- Retweeting creates what many people consider to be "noise" on Twitter

- Twitter’s 140 character limit

- Some people consider retweeting to be like copying other people’s work for your own gain, though this concept is heavily disputed

Conclusion

A recent study from Pear Analytics found that about 8.70% of the tweets it researched were retweets. In some of the more web-oriented circles, this probably even seems quite low. Without a doubt though, Twitterers are retweeting tweets like there’s no tomorrow. Obviously businesses can see value in this, especially if they provide some kind of content that they would like to see shared.

As always, it comes down to providing quality content – the old "content is king" cliché. Even as the web has evolved, that simple fact remains true. If you provide something interesting, people will share it.

Scoble’s whole "Retweet vs. Like" concept is an interesting one in itself. We have certainly seen Facebook make numerous changes to its interface that seem to move the network closer to the realm of Twitter. You have to wonder if Facebook will eventually incorporate some kind of retweet-like functionality itself.

What are your thoughts on retweeting? Do you see value in it or is it just noise? Tell us what you think.

Update: Tr.im has apparently had a change of heart, and decided to remain functional. On the company blog, Tr.im’s founder says:

We have restored tr.im, and re-opened its website. We have been absolutely overwhelmed by the popular response, and the countless public and private appeals I have received to keep tr.im alive.

We have answered those pleas. Nambu will keep tr.im operating going forward, indefinitely, while we continue to consider our options in regards to tr.im’s future.

Either way, Tr.im has managed to bring a seemingly important subject into the spotlight, and it is still one worth thinking about.

Original Article: Shortened URLs come in quite handy when you want to share a link, but the URL is simply too long. Twitter’s rise to popularity has carried the popularity of such services right up with it. Naturally, when you have a 140-character limit, such a tool becomes much more in-demand.

Over the weekend, URL shortening service Tr.im announced that it was closing down shop. This is by no means the most popular service of its kind. But the big story here is not that we’re losing Tr.im. It’s that the idea of losing Tr.im brings up a much broader issue in what happens to all of those shortened URLs?

Tell WebProNews readers what you think about the situation.

"When these services go away, tens of thousands of links on the web simply stop working," says Mashable’s Pete Cashmore. "Some sites will lose hundreds of inbound links, and the traffic that comes with them."

"If Tr.im shuts down its servers, millions of links will simply die," says Mashable’s Ben Parr separately. "Poof, just like that. Someone could even buy Tr.im and redirect all the links to spam, porn, or malware."

Tr.im says in its announcement that all of its URLs will continue to redirect until December 31. Parr thinks someone will buy Tr.im before the end of the year. Bit.ly, Twitter’s go-to shortener has a project called 301works, (which archives URLs) told the publication that they offered to host Tr.im’s URL mappings, but it is not clear yet if anything will come of that.

But once again, the issue lies on a much larger plane than that of Tr.im. If more of these sites fail for any reason or get hacked, the web could turn into link bedlam. "Millions upon millions of links could suddenly vanish, leaving users confused and a possibly uncleanable mess," says Parr.

How Big is the Problem Really?

Or perhaps we’re sensationalizing this a little bit. There’s no question that there are many, many shortened URLs out there in circulation, but if they all stopped working, what would happen? Let’s look at where they’re being used – Twitter. In a hypothetic scenario where no URL shortening service works any longer, people will stop using them from that point on. That eliminates the further spread of problem-links.

That leaves you with all of the ones out there that people have posted in the past. That means while they are out there to be clicked on, they will become more and more buried as time goes on. Twitter Search is after all about what is happening "right now."

I don’t mean to play down the issue too much. It is definitely an issue, and there would still be some hiccups experienced by many webmasters. Twitter does drive a lot of traffic for a lot of people. But most of that traffic I would guess comes from fresh tweets, rather than tweets that are days or weeks old that would carry broken links.

I fully acknowledge that Twitter is not the only source of URL shortened-links, but it is easily the largest. Links could stop working at many places around the web, but it’s not going to be a mass web apocalypse. Google results aren’t going to stop offering legitimate links.

Is the 140-Character Limit Bad for the Web?

If anything, the issue casts yet another shadow of vulnerability on Twitter, and at a time when it has already received mass media attention over a Denial-of-Service attack. Without functioning links, Twitter becomes a lot less useful for many users. Does Twitter want to depend on third party services for such functionality as it continues to grow? Is rethinking the 140-character limit in order?

Twitter does have a relationship with Bit.ly, which is alive and well, but maybe Twitter just needs its own such service, just so it (or its users at least) doesn’t have to rely on others. But what would happen to all of those if Twitter had its own shortener? Without such high demand, would they continue to thrive? If not, they could add to the problem with that many more compromised links.

I don’t know. I don’t claim to have the answers. The whole thing does raise some important questions about the web though. If Twitter is to become a long-term major player in communication on the web, some things are going to need to be addressed. Any thoughts on the situation? Please share them.