Over the past few months, I have been getting into the Genesis Framework. Having done a lot of WordPress integration work, I appreciate how the framework makes quick work of a lot of the standard build requirements found in a WordPress project so that I can move on to the real meat of the work. In particular, the framework has a lot of the SEO considerations already baked in.
Recently, though, I had noticed that even with Genesis’ breadcrumbs enabled and on display, Google Webmaster Tools was only counting a tiny amount.
Even after tweaking some settings, I couldn’t get the default breadcrumbs to work read correctly on Webmaster Tools, and I was seeing a corresponding downward trend in my Google-based traffic. Apparently, Genesis treats breadcrumbs as a UI flourish or UX benefit, but not a SEO signal. Eventually, I got determined enough to set out and fix the problem. And fortunately, the solution proved easier than I expected.
#0 – Confirm Breadcrumbs are Turned On in Genesis Settings
While this should be obvious, you want to be sure your Breadcrumbs are actually turned on using the Genesis settings.
If that is setup correctly, you should have a breadcrumbs displaying on your homepage.
#1 – Install WordPress SEO by Yoast
This is a great plugin to help with a number of SEO considerations. Put together, Genesis provides much of your structured data and Yoast feeds in most of your additional information. You can download Yoast here.
#2 – Turn on Breadcrumbs for Yoast
The next step might originally seem in conflict with the first step, but it’s actually easiest to manage your breadcrumbs if you turn them on for both Genesis and Yoast.
Yoast provides a number of settings for you to consider, so feel free to set and play with those to your liking. You may notice that it includes some PHP code to include in order to display those breadcrumbs. If you have Genesis breadcrumbs enabled, you won’t have to worry about that, as the two plugins work together just fine – Genesis takes the settings from Yoast and displays them on your theme.
#3 – Enjoy an increased Breadcrumb count
Two days after getting these settings worked out, I saw a small increase in my breadcrumb count.
And by the end of the week…
And onward and upward…
I’d be interested to know if anyone has had more success working strictly through Genesis or any other options/techniques used. Feel free to leave any comments or questions below.
Good tip Matthew, thanks. I’m a big fan of Yoast SEO. They now integrated with Google’s Search Console which shows you crawl errors. Very cool.
what should we do to show up the full url in google serp results and still keep breadcrump in genesis theme?