What are Google Sitelinks?
June 13th, 2008
Some of our clients have noticed that the listing that Google has for their website in its results pages has a number of sub-links below its main entry on the results pages and have to come us to ask “What are these?”
These sub-links are in effect ‘short-cuts’ to pages deep within a website that Google has placed in its search results which allow users looking for your site, to link directly into the pages of your site without first going through the main entry page Google has listed for your site (more often than not this main entry page is your site’s Home Page).
Take a look at the screen-shot images above and below in this article, which illustrate the concept.
Google calls these sub-link short-cuts into the inner pages of your website, “Sitelinks” and defines them as:
“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.”
There’s no doubt that ‘Sitelinks’ are a useful enhancement to a website’s listing in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) once they’ve been allocated ‘Sitelinks’ by Google. However because Sitelinks are generated automatically by Google’s algorithm (the complex mathematical formulae that Google uses to rank websites in its results), as a website owner there is little control over what can and can’t be displayed the Sitelinks listed for any particular website.
Furthermore, Google, like everything it does with respect to its search results: keeps it’s method of generating Sitelinks a secret in order to stop any one website dominating its search results. So it’s not as if you could drop them an email to ask them.
However Google does offer some background information on the subject of Sitelinks and how website owners can to some degree, control their display.
Take a look at their own blog at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/information-about-sitelinks.html
and within the Webmaster Help Centre on its own site:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523
Researching the subject on the web through various SEO blogs and forums it seems that the consensus of opinion by experienced web marketers is that in order for a site to be allocated Sitelinks by Google, it generally has to satisfy a number of criteria, namely;
• The website is easily spiderable with a well structured navigation
• The site gets a good ranking with high levels of natural search traffic
• The site has a high click through rate (CTR) from the search results page
• The site presents useful outbound links
• There are many inbound links from high quality, 3rd party websites
• The website age is several years old
If you have a website, whether it’s ours or not and you feel that it’s ranking in Google could be improved, then get in touch for a free site evaluation.
