Google have announced that they have started replacing the URLs found beneath website titles in mobile search results by the site name and a categorized breadcrumb path. The current roll out is for mobile users only, with an expected wider expansion soon.
Google states that starting from today:
“algorithms that display URLs in the search results to better reflect the names of websites, using the real-world name of the site instead of the domain name, and the URL structure of the sites in a breadcrumbs-like format.”
The procedure has been under testing for several years now and has been seen by several Google search users over the years.
This is a much better presentation of website details as mobile screens are much smaller compared to desktop screens and usually URLs are cut off midway and the viewer can’t know where the page is being retrieved from. This neater manner of presentation will let the users know which section of the particular website they are about to visit.
This change might not effect websites without a layered structure. Websites like Wikipedia, organisational or shopping websites are better suited for this presentation as their URLs can be replaced by their page hierarchy giving easy demonstration of the path used to get to that page from the homepage of the website.
Google has also announced support for schema.org structured data for websites to let the Google algorithms retrieve certain data from websites. The data will include the website name to be used instead of the domain name and the structure of the websites URL as breadcrumbs. Google has provided further details and code examples for web developers and webmasters to better understand how they can employ this structured data scheme.
The changes are rolling out gradually where the ‘.com’ mobile domain will see the change first which has started rolling out, beginning from the US and expanding worldwide. Other Google search country domains will see the change in the second stage of the roll out expected soon but there is no exact timeline provided.