How can I get Yoast SEO under Wordpress to display multilevel heirarchical breadcrumbs?

Question

(Migrated from Meta)

How can I get Yoast SEO + Wordpress to display multilevel breadcrumbs?

When I migrated from a static site, I had breadcrumbs like:

My Site → Orthodox Books Online, and More → Socratic Dialogue → Plato: The Allegory of the... Flickering Screen?

Or if you'd like source,

<p class="breadcrumb"><a href="https://example.com/plato/" title="Jonathan's Corner &rarr; Orthodox Books Online, and More">example.com</a> &rarr; <a href="https://example.com/library/" title="An online library where you can read whole books free.">Orthodox Books Online, and More</a> &rarr; <a href="https://example.com/library/#socratic_dialogue" title="An eclectic assortment of Socratic dialogue.">Socratic Dialogue</a> &rarr; Plato: The Allegory of the... <em>Flickering Screen?</em></p>

In other words, there were multiple levels. (Please note that for the Wordpress implementation, I'm intending one parent page per level of heirarchy.)

I've looked around, and I haven't found instructions to recreate this kind of breadcrumb (or something that would be better in the context).

How can I recreate this basic breadcrumb effect, or have something else that would be a better fit with Wordpress + Yoast SEO?

Answer 1

Wordpress uses Categories and Pages for their breadcrumbs.

Posts typically look something like Home>Blog Page Name>Parent Category>Child Category>Post.

Pages look like Home>Parent Page>Child Page>Page.

If you want to create nested breadcrumbs, then you need to create nested categories for posts or nested parent pages for Pages.

And from what I understand, breadcrumbs are more a part of your underlying theme/WordPressn than Yoast. Yoast just adds the JSON . Per their KB - What do Yoast Breadcrumbs Do?, Yoast will "output JSON-LD data in the source code".

Given the source code you provided, it looks like you are looking for HTML breadcrumbs within your webpages, not necessarily the JSON breadcrumbs that Google uses. However, Yoast would create the necessary JSON-LD based on your HTML breadcrumbs. It's entirely up to Google though whether they choose to display your breadcrumbs.