Hello!
The breadcrumbs don’t consider term redirects–it’s not part of the spec we applied. It won’t be easy to implement this feature, either.
First, we’ll have to follow the redirect (because redirects can chain, and we must also hope that the chain is valid and doesn’t abort). Then, we’ll have to assess if the page it redirects to is part of your website, and is hierarchically related to the page displayed. Lastly, we’ll also have to find the right breadcrumb name.
This link assertion alone can at least double the loading time of your page, only to satisfy a single line on Google.
“But, I redirect to a page on the site.”–yes, that’s true. But not everyone will do that; this is an edge-case. Plus, you can supersede the redirect via other methods we cannot infer from the option, such as global Apache/.htaccess rules. I’m not one to bake in “only works some of the time” features into TSF.
So, to work around this, we’ll have to allow you to manually insert breadcrumbs, which we oppose for various reasons.
Ultimately, I believe this is a waste of time and effort; you’d be better off disabling the breadcrumb script and let Google try and figure out the hierarchy–they got a few million CPU hours spare that churn through redirects all day, without affecting your site’s performance ??
Alternatively, you can use a structured data plugin alongside TSF that’ll allow you to fill in the breadcrumbs manually.
Or–and I believe you should do this if you have the time and expertise–, keep using a real category without redirecting it, and use a (child-)theme template file to improve the output of the archive. This template will allow you to optimize it just as well as any other page.
In any case, I hope this explains our stance on the issue and how we tackle things quite well. I also hope the alternatives are within reach ?? Cheers!
