Evaluating "breadcrumbs" layouts

Solution 1 : traditional

Sites Mediacore > OSInet > Product & Services > Computer Associates (Brightstor) > ARCserve 2000

--> Warning: links loop on this page. This is just to compare layout solutions. Compare with solution 2.

In this breadcrumb format, every component in the logical path is clickable and sends to the default page for the logical level, like:

Feedback to fgm@osinet.fr or in news:comp.infosystems.www.authoring.site-design , thread "Evaluating breadcrumb layouts".

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Quite common, should be natural to most visitors Ordinary/plain: does not carry an idea about richness of content and technicity
Low content density: users won't be overwhelmed Low content density: requires more pages/link pages

Natural crawl for web spiders (search engines). Search engines using a PageRank algorithm will find the C(i) factor, thus pages using this type of links will divide their outgoing PageRank by a smaller factor

Requires a top node, thus a path longer by one unit over the scheme in solution 2

Detail

In Sites Mediacore, a page explaining about Mediacore and showing child levels:

In Sites Mediacore: > OSInet:, a page explaining about OSInet and showing child levels:

... and so on...

Compare with solution 2Compteur Audean