For Google Rich Snippets, should the last item in a breadcrumb be a link?

Question

A website has the following breadcrumb trail when on the "Labrador" page:

Services > Squirrel Chasing > Labrador

As you may notice, the current page is not linked to. (There is an internal reason with a difficult solution.)

The last item in Google’s recommended (data-vocabulary.org) Microdata markup will be missing the itemprop="url" attribute, with only:

• itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Breadcrumb",
• and itemprop="title".

Is the lack of a link to the current page an issue?

The goal is to have the above breadcrumbs appear in Google search results, for example:

Solution 1

Including the current page in the breadcrumbs is not required by Google:

Each breadcrumb item should appear in order, with the first item representing the top-level page, and the final item representing the parent of the current page.

Therefore, it should not matter if it is marked up at all.

However, the effects of marking it up with everything apart from the URL are still unknown to me.

Solution 2

Current breadcrumbs markup in schema.org is a crap. A lot of discussions, but current issues are still not solved. Check out the latest thread about it at public-vocabs. The best attempt for now to solve it is here (not accepted).

I advise you to use Google's markup since you're mostly interested in this SE.

Comments

[Baumr]

I hadn't realized that Schema.org markup for breadcrumbs isn't the same as the data-vocabulary.org recommended by Google — I updated the question, thanks +1