I’m not sure how long this has been happening, but today I noticed that Google was displaying breadcrumb like category names instead of URLs in the natural search results. It only seems to be showing for larger, more popular sites. I’ve noticed it in spots 1 through 10, so they are not limiting it to top 3 listings as some other tests have been limited to.
It could only be that authority sites are getting these results right now. This is a very interesting happening as many webmasters will use a URL rewrite to make sure their keyword or category name shows up in the URL so that it is bold and visible in the search results. Now some URLs are not showing at all. We’ll keep our eyes on this to see if it becomes more wide-spread.
