Google Sitelinks Issue - How to get sitelinks for shorter phrase?

[BrettFromTibet]

Our company, an international brand with almost 100k inlinks, got sitelinks in Google's webmaster console several months ago.

The problem is, we only get sitelinks for a long and rarely searched-for phrase that is in our title tag.

If our company was called "Example," our URL was http://example.com... and our home page title tag was "Example Global Blahblah Solutions"

The bizare thing, is that sitelinks appears for our brand name very briefly in Australia, NZ and the USA... and then dissapeared. Now we only get sitelinks for "Example Global Blahblah Solutions"!

But in Google.co.UK...we get sitelinks for our brand name!

QUESTION: How can we get sitelinks for our short, unique brand name (same as domain name) rather than the long phrase in our title tag?

Thanks,

Brett

Note: I am not trying to link drop or add URLS, I just don't know how to make this concise without it.

[tedster]

All you can currently do is veto a particular sitelink in your Webmaster Tools account. The rest is done completely by algorithm and the sitelinks algo doesn't seem very easy to influence.

Clear site structure and menu labels help a bit, but just a bit. The actual labels that the sitelinks algo generates seem to have a mind of their own at times. But I have noticed some of the strange ones tend ot be improved after a while.

[BrettFromTibet]

Tedster,

Thanks for your response. The pages that Google has chosen for our sitelinks are nearly perfect. They picked all the right pages. We vetoed one of them.

The problem is that we only get sitelinks for a long, obscure phrase in our title tag. (except in the UK... Google gives us sitelinks for our name)

It would be like if SEOmoz only got sitelinks for "SEO Search Engine Optimization- Read SEOmoz" but not for "SEOmoz."

Does title tag have a big influence on sitelinks? Would changing our title tag to just our company name (and losing our main keywords) be likely to change the phrase we get sitelinks for?

[tedster]

Oh - now I understand better. You are talking about which search phrase shows the Sitelinks and which doesn't. That can be even more obscure. For instance, Apple gets no sitelinks for "itunes" but it does for "macintosh".

It has a lot to do with being clearly the big destination for that specific search term. If your business name includes generic words that can make this a lot harder. I've never noticed any effect from the title element of the home page - that might be worth an experiment if you're willing to risk one. When it comes to the domain root, I rarely mess around.

[edited by: tedster at 7:45 am (utc) on June 2, 2008]

[BrettFromTibet]

It's clearly the big main destination for our brand name / domain (that doesn't include any generic terms).

What is crazy is that we get sitelinks for our name in the UK. and we got them for about a week everywhere else.. and then they went away.

I guess this is a tough problem, but thanks for your response and examples.