Clarification of SEO and Breadcrumbs topic

[thejake420]

The breadcrumb navigation is irrelevant in terms of search engine optimization.

Clarification of above
(Speaking strictly as an SEO expert with thousands of #1 results on Google)

Although breadcrumb navigation (on page, not TITLE tag) includes the same number of links and the same anchor text regardless of the order, it is not irrelevant to SEO. The order in which links and even plain text appear within a page's source code DO make a difference, albeit usually slight.

Assuming all other factors being equal, a page with a "Lions" link near the top and a "Tigers" link near the bottom would generally rank higher for "tigers" than a page with a "Tigers" link near the to and a "Lions" link near the bottom.

Given that the breadcrumbs are inherently next to one another, the effect of the order is ALMOST negligible in practice, but it does have an effect. The more pages you have with any particular breadcrumb configuration, the more of an effect this has (although still nearly negligible for most sites in "real world" usage.)

When these same "breadcrumbs" (although not clickable) are inserted dynamically into the page TITLE tag, they have a much greater effect.

"Site.com / Mammals / Cats / Lions" is far superior to "Lions / Cats / Mammals / Site.com" in most situations, as the typical search would be more like "pictures of lions and other big cats" than "pictures on site.com of mammals who happen to be cats or lions". The order of these elements in a TITLE tag plays a huge role in SERP results.


Jake

[Joachim Müller]

In my opinion the breadcrumb order should not be reversed even if it made the gallery a wee bit more SEF. Instead, you could use the terms in the breadcrumb, reverse the order and print it before the breadcrumb (maybe even together with the keywords assigned to a particular pic/album), maybe in a box that could be labelled "keywords for this page". As with all search engine optimization methods there is a thin line between search engine spam and legitimate optimization, so this would have to be placed carefully.
You're correct that the search engine spiders "like" ("like" as in: consider it more relevant) the repetition of the page's title in the body section of the page, so yes: the title should be repeated as well. I considered removing the gallery name (which most people just fill with their domain name, which is usually not a bright idea in terms of SE friendliness) from the content of the <title>-tag, but I'm afraid that there will be a lot of users who will complain, so this would have to be an admin-settable option if it is meant to go into the core.
You're of course right as well that search engine spiders consider textual content at the very start of the document's body as well as at the very end to be more relevant than content in the middle. To take advantage of this, we should offer a breadcrumb (and/or maybe even the page keyword box that I suggested above) at the end of the page as well.
I'm more than willing to discuss legitimate search engine optimization ideas for cpg1.5.x and I would be happy to have you (as a SEO expert) look into this. Please review the discussion "Draft Specification for SEO for Coppermine" as well.

Joachim