Today, over at Google Webmaster Central, Search Quality made an announcement about webmasters providing feedback about what sitelinks they provide to users for your website and which links you may want to remove.
Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.
If you log into your account for sitemaps, you can now see if Google SERPs are offering users sitelinks for your account. As SEOpittfall.com has not produced any sitelinks, the following message was provided:
Sitelinks [?]
Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.
Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.
Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site. Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they’ll be useful to the user. If your site’s structure doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user’s query, we won’t show them. However, we are always working to improve how we find and display sitelinks.
How do you get sitelinks to be provided for your website?
Without knowing what specific factors are being used by Google to produce sitelinks, there are two things that have been apparent:
- Only the first result for a search query will show sitelinks
- Large Websites containing major sections that are easy to distinguish
What does this mean?
This allows a listing in Google results pages to have additional real estate beyond additional relevant listings (tabbed under the first listing). This also means that you have developed a functional structure that is easy for an algorithm to decipher niches within a given topic on your website.
Here are a few instances of sitelinks for different search queries:
White House
NFL
Chicago Cubs
Automobile
Do you have any sitelinks?
Have you seen any additional traffic provided?
Related Posts >>
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- More Information About Sitelinks
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I heard somewhere that to be qualified for sitelinks the website must be in 1st position of google index at a specific keyword for at least 1 year…I don’t know if it’s real, but it makes sense to me…
Any idea on how to prompt Google to generate sitelinks for any particular site? I’m assuming this won’t be utilized on sites unless they are “popular?”
Google does keep this pretty close to their chest, however, natural sitelinks are only delivered for the first result for a particular keyword. The other is that the site can be considered the authoritative site for the given keyword or search phrase. You can see if your site has sitelinks, even if you don’t see them for the search term you want, through Google Webmaster Tools account.
Thanks for the comment.
This sitelinks would help a searcher in two ways: they can get a better understanding of what the site is about before they visit, and they can take a shortcut from Google to the topic that interests them.: