Google Adds Sitelinks for a New Batch of Websites

[Oliver Henniges]

A few days before X-mas last year it has been reported here in webmasterworld that google implemented a new section in webmaster central, where we could help to finetune the displaying of sitelinks.
Today a friend of mine mailed me, that now a search-query for his domain name comes up with those sitelinks. I immediately checked mine, and - bingo - there they are.

Both our sites are hosted in Germany and are indexed with a TBPR of 3. What are your experiences with this? Normally such innovations first spread for U.S.-sites and then gradually are moved to all other languages and countries. When did what happen for which PR-levels in which regions?

A few days after Christmas I blocked one of the sitelinks in my console, because I found it a bit inappropriate, i.e. not so useful for my visitors (though nevertheless displayed quite on top of my frontpage, because it is quite important with respect to thematical balance). Nevertheless google shows this link (to give some feedback to the googlers reading here).

Do you think we as webmasters in the near future might play a more active role in defining which pages to choose as sitelinks?

Will you change your overall organization of themes, now that you know ideally exactly EIGHT "should" fill root-level?

[Oliver Henniges]

Did we ever discuss when and where sitelinks come up after queries other than the domain-name?

For instance, a friend of mine is on #1 WITH sitelinks on a really, really competitive "german" one-word-term (more than 300.000.000 pages), whereas the english equivalent shows the wiki-entry on spot #1 without sitelinks and seems far less competitive.

[Robert Charlton]

Did we ever discuss when and where sitelinks come up after queries other than the domain-name?

To quote from my post on this thread [webmasterworld.com]...

A domain has got to be dominant for a particular query to get sitelinks. I haven't come up with a simple description of how dominant, though. Each time I think I've figured it out, I come up with an exception.

[Dice]

Hey All,
I've just checked my sites, a couple of them have sitelinks now. All of them PR3 "frontpage". The sitelinks for these sites come up using the following queries:
-example.nl,
-full company name,
-core business of company + compnay name,
-city + core business of company,
-city + part of company name (consists of 3 parts)
very nice!

Also nice to notice we're #1 for localized results. i.e. "corebusiness city" gives me the google map result with several companies that provide the same kind of services. Does anyone know if these results are generated by the same algorithm that provides regular SERPS?

[edited by: Dice at 9:48 am (utc) on Feb. 26, 2008]

[phranque]

Also nice to notice we're #1 for localized results. i.e. "corebusiness city" gives me the google map result with several companies that provide the same kind of services. Does anyone know if these results are generated by the same algorithm that provides regular SERPS?

that is a different algo and influenced quite a bit by the Google Maps Local Business Center listing [maps.google.com].

[Bewenched]

Well .. dang it ... we had site links showing and webmaster tools showed them too. but today they are ALL gone. We made NO changes to the site.

[attard]

I'm seeing them, too. But most of the links are not the ones that would be most appropriate for one of our sites. WebmasterTools doesn't show any links for the site in question yet.

Is there any way to provide Google better feedback as to what does constitute the best links?

[Oliver Henniges]

> A domain has got to be dominant for a particular query to get sitelinks.

Would you agree this is suppossed to read "one-word-query"?

Sitenote: Two days after my initial posting the sitelink, which I blocked in WC, now doesn't show up any more. Another hint how carefully the googlers follow these threads without posting themselves.

[Robert Charlton]

Would you agree this is supposed to read "one-word-query"?

No... I'm currently seeing Site Links on client sites for several competitive two and three-word phrases.

The Site Links on one of these have been around for quite a while... not just on this update.

[Bewenched]

Yippe. Today they are back for ours. i just hope they don't take them away again. We are adding a lot of new items probably 600 or more which are all new product releases so I hope they don't think we are spamming.

[barney]

How does Google Determine what links to add for the sitelink? Do they look at h1 tags or the way the sites are named?

[tedster]

It's a complex algorithm, and apparently still evolving. I can tell for certain that it's not something as black and white as H1 tags, or the main menu, or how close a link is to the top of the source code for the Home Page. The algo apparently combines factors, and what Google determines as the "site structure" is the key. That's a rather general term, but internal linking is probably a very big part of it.

One of my clients has long had Sitelinks that included a link to one of their subdomains - an online magazine. One of the magazine articles picked up lots of backlinks and traffic in the past few months, and now that particular Sitelink has shifted and goes directly to that popular article instead of the subdomain's home page.

[ChicagoFan67]

I have one site in which the site links very closely correlate to the top search queries and another site in which search queries don't factor at all. On this latter site, it seems to have more to do with the internal links. Site structure is very simple - I have 7 categories of widgets. A page for each, all linking to each other and to and from the homepage. Google has given me sitelinks to 6 of the 7 and my links page. I am wondering why "title - category 4 widgets" missed out!

[netmeg]

I wish there was a way to sort of suggest which would be the most appropriate sitelinks, like with the sitemap - Google doesn't have to use it, but it gives them an idea of how we see our sites' structures.

My site finally got three sitelinks over the weekend. It's an event site, and almost all the links are via two drop downs, one for date and one for city. When the site links showed up, I got one link from the top navigation, and two from the city drop down. They're not the first listed, nor the most linked-to, nor the most visited, nor the soonest occurring. They don't even have the highest Pagerank of my internal pages. Actually, there's nothing that I can come up with that would explain why links to those two pages show up, as opposed to any of the other 250+ pages I have so far. Or why there's only two.

It'd be great if I could have links to the most searched-for pages, or even the most linked-to pages. I thought maybe if I moved things around a little, I could guide it that way, but it doesn't look like that helps. It just takes what it wants.

But what I got is better than nothing, so I'll wait and see if it changes.