Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
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?
I woke up today to find my website now has sitelinks in the serps. It's the first time I've ever seen it for my website and I'm hoping it means I'm doing something right.
The sitelinks only work for my website's name as far as I can tell, which is quite unique. There are six sitelinks showing and the algo has correctly chosen the busiest sections with the most articles.
I do not see any change in traffic, although recently I've seen approximately 20 percent increase from both Google and Yahoo.
I'm guessing I should be happy about this... but I'm not sure why.
... but the really strange thing is, according to Webmastertools, 'Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site'!
[edited by: tedster at 10:29 am (utc) on Feb. 24, 2008]
... but the really strange thing is, according to Webmastertools, 'Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site'!
Strange indeed! For so many it's the other way around. Guess this proves we have a new roll-out of Sitelinks. Some earlier reports also were posted in another thread [webmasterworld.com].
It would be nice to hear of some traffic improvements from those who just got Sitelinks.
[edited by: Clark at 7:35 pm (utc) on Feb. 24, 2008]
For google.ca, another set of SERPs that the site is popular on, DID show them. Site has nothing to do with Canada.
Then the links disappeared from GWT. They're still gone.
But now - since two days ago or so - they're displayed on the SERPs of google.com.
...
I guess this much inconsistency is necessary for me to feel secure about being an SEO, in fact I think I'd feel -less- secure if Google suddenly got its act together *grin*
traffic virtually unaffected.
...
But what if any real benefit is there to these?
what if any real benefit is there to these
One nice side effect is a bit of insight into how Google views your site hierarchy.
People do click them too, although as they're mainly for brand terms the effect is more of skipping a navigation step for visitors who would ordinarily start at the homepage.
Personally, I think it makes sites seem, slightly more 'important' to end users: a bit of a bonus on top of the 'number one site is best' impression that persists.
Hey, more page real-estate can never be a bad thing, right?
Personally, I think it makes sites seem, slightly more 'important' to end users
In most cases, I only see the sitelinks when searching for an exact match of the domain name (with or without spaces). So, unless visitors are searching for that, I don't see how anyone will ever see it. I also see the sitelinks occurring for domains that have been 950'd or heavily penalized on most search phrases. So it can't be much of an indicator of "authority".
So it can't be much of an indicator of "authority".
Not to an SEO, no. But end users think that the higher up in results a site is the 'better' it is. I'm not saying this is a good perception, but it seems quite widely held.
I only see the sitelinks when searching for an exact match of the domain name (with or without spaces). So, unless visitors are searching for that, I don't see how anyone will ever see it.
Those can be very useful visitors though. One example is people researching a company before a purchasing decision.
I suspect one of google's future goal is to present the searcher not only eight such suggestions for the main page, but also "alternative entrances" to more complex websites on all levels.
For instance think of wikipedias disambiguation-pages or "related products" on an ecommerce sites. Google's searchers will surely appreciate, if, after searching for mere widgets, the serps will offer you direct links to the green,red,yellow,blue... widget landing pages.
I think, a related phenomenon are those additional two-word-searches, which google now for a couple of months presents as a footer for most one-word-searches. Also eight in most cases, by the way.
Both phenomena again underline the important role of Semantics in current algos.
Semantics, KI and the goal of "machine-understanding natural languages" from the very beginning have suffered the absence of data on what has been called "world knowledge:"
For instance, take again the disambiguation-problem. If you want to decide whether the word "Queen" on a given website denotes a British rock-band or one of the other 52 Alternatives wiki lists, you have to "understand" the whole rest of the website. And statistical analysis of word-coocurrance can only give hints, but not "decide" with sufficient precision.
I'm not up to date, but I think academic research in semantics in her comuper-models has for a long time been working with artificial semantic markers added to the lexemes of the dicitonary "by hand". With googles massive amount of data collected already (+user behaviour data by the toolbar), for the first time in history it seems possible this "world knowledge" be integrated into a model on an automated SCALABLE basis.
So the benefit for the searcher will be navigation-efficiency.
The benefit for us webmasters is that those links give us hints how google views our sites organized thematically. And the benfit for google is that we, clicking those links, will reinforce the relevant paths of the neuronal semantic network, not-clicking those links will sort out the irrelevant.
Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site.
But thankfully that is not accurate as it is now showing the links
I only see the site links when searching for an exact match of the domain name
...piqued my interest, so I took a look at my stats.
In the last 30 days, at least 975 visitors arrived at my site using some variation of my exact domain name, spaces, no spaces, .com, no.com, etc.
But they visited an average of just over 24 pages each. That's a bit over 3 times the average pageviews per visit for all my visitors.
Mine is a strictly info site, no onsite sales at all.
But still, that 975 is only a fraction of one percent of my visitor total, so if the site links only show for domain name type searches, then not many of my visitors will ever see them.
They had been showing them in webmaster tools for sometime, but are just now.
they have obviously done a manual site review because one of the links is not within the main "menu" that all the other links came from.
Congrats to all.
I’m seeing the opposite site links that have been up for months have disappeared in GWT
They are still showing on the SERP’s so I hope this is a glitch, closer inspection of PR extra with in the tools doesn’t improve my out look as the highest PR page of my site is still showing “Data is not available at this time.” For January, very strange is anyone else seeing this, my sites info seems to be at least a month out on GWT, page rank not up dating or at least is in limbo. My SERP’s appear to be the same no huge ranking differences.
Is this a Glitch or is anyone else experiencing similar effects.
Vimes.
I'm still worried about the PR not being updated tho is anyone else seeing this with in GWT, the two combined site links disappearing and PR on the highest page not reporting information.
Just wondering if I'm seeing the beginning of something drastic happening or if its the same for others.
Vimes
including ones where I have suggested a new sitelink in webmaster tools
i'm not seeing where you can suggest a sitelink.
here's the most recent GWT blog post on SiteLinks [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com].
1) High PR is not necessary; I have PR2s and 3s showing sitelinks.
2) In most cases, the webmaster tool is not in sync with the SERPs i.e. it says I don't have them on majority of sites
3) Data used appears to be at least 3 weeks old. I have a site that shows them but to pages that no longer exist since we published new site on 1st Feb.
4) Unclear how sitelink title is generated. They are not using title tag, header tag, page file name or anchor text used in IBLs or internal links consistently. Nor does it appear to be based on keyword density.
5) On a few sites they are only using 3 or 4 sitelinks but then displaying an additional 2nd listing (normal, old format) directly underneath instead of as a sitelink.
Also on another I'm seeing a site link to the contact page AND another link under it as another result - also to the contact page!
