Bauer from Germany noticed that Google has started adding breadcrumb URLs in search engine result pages. For those who want to maximize their pages for this, is the kind of delimiter used important? Should people gravitate towards one symbol and ignore others? What are the best practices that can be implemented for this particular feature?
It is a tough question to answer for Matt Cutts solely because the breadcrumb project is in its infancy. Google is still experimenting with different ways of execution and this volatility means that it is not yet the right time to recommend best practices. He compares the situation to the time when site links was still new. Back then, they did not have the tools and other infrastructure to support site links but things were eventually built one by one. The same thing is likely to happen with breadcrumbs since it is proving to be a popular feature.
For now, all that they can adviSe is that webmasters use delimited links that faithfully reflect the site’s hierarchy and Google should be able to take it from there. Any new developments will be posted on the Webmaster Central blog.