Google’s Word on Sitelinks in Your SERPS
Posted By Melanie Prough on April 2, 2009
I’m kind of glad to see Google come out and say a few things about sitelinks in the search results, as this has been a fairly common question in the webmaster / SEO community. Sitelinks are those extra links that appear under a listing for different pages within the site.
There has of course been much theory as how how one might incite such an occurrence, but nothing concrete that I have seen. Google says in the announcement that the selection for displaying sitelinks has many factors within the algorithm. They do however expound of a few. Google says this “completely automated process” of selecting sites for sitelinks is, at least partially dependent on the site’s navigational structure and speed of navigation. They commented also, that the selection is also dependent of the site’s relevance to the searcher’s query. I am quite sure the “several factors” that are used in this process, weigh quite heavily as well.
What is the SEO / optimization opportunity of this disclosure by Google? Well, it’s what we should all know….Good navigation, fast pages, and staying on theme for the whole site. Plus whatever else might be tossed in the pot…Such as the site’s Trust Rank or factor, possibly age of the site, relative inbound links, volume of the search terms, and even perhaps Page Rank.
Google is now displaying the sitelink opportunities for your site in Webmasters Tools. These are in fact potential sitelinks and not necessarily in use. Just select a site from your dashboard, click the links tab and you will find the sitelinks area is now among your other link utilities. They have given us some control over the display of these “potential” sitelinks. You can in fact block a potential sitelink from displaying. One example the gave was if a page has expired, and really that’s about the only reason I can think of. Blocking a potential sitelink will block it from displaying the the search results for 90 days, unless you unblock it. They caution that these procedures are still running about a week behind to reflect in the SERPs (search engine result pages).
Note, this is not the same thing as a regular indented result with carries a description for the cascading result. I have used Google’s example below for reference.
Google Sitelinks
Click the Results Image to Enlarge
As you can see it’s much like a menu. The anchor text is a sampling of the page title, with what looks like the site’s name or the search terms removed…Most likely for SERP space. The title displayed appears to be limited to 24/25 characters and spaces combined. These results look to me to be highly dependent on the relevance of the search terms. It’s pretty hard to produce these results without a very relevant query, where as the indented results are becoming quite frequent.
Peace and SEO
Melanie Prough
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