(Entry was posted by James Fuller on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 04/12/2018).

Breadcrumbs. How important are they?

Breadcrumbs. How important are they? If your website isn`t very deep can you do well without them? I tried plugging them into my website but at first glance the results were ugly. I would need to spend quite a bit of time cleaning up the visual layout. I`m assuming they should be visible.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Mal Ã– Tonge: Breadcrumbs are fairly important, they help the user understand the structure of your website, also they help google and with the correct markup google will also publish your breadcrumbs within search results and will look similar to the image below. I understand that they can sometimes breadcrumbs look bad out of the box, if you could send your link I can take a look and style them for you with custom CSS. no charge!Edited Answer: forgot to add image. My bad. Add breadcrumb markup to categories to achieve the same as below.
Neil Cheesman: `Important` to this can be the `length` of the breadcrumb as if too long they can look very unwieldy...
James Fuller: Thanks for the offer. I figured them out.
Mike Stewart: flat or deep architecture... more for UX than anything. Great for sites that have 3rd tier drop down menus and no mega menu functions.
Arsen Rabinovich: When properly implemented, they help with focusing topics. And are often used to represent topical silos when doing so with URLs isn`t possible.