Sitelinks: Authority - or Inbound Links plus Good Architecture?

[martinibuster]

In another thread someone posted:

we... have sitelinks, so our site is considered an authority one...

Are sitelinks a sign of authority or a sign of reaching a threshold for inbound links to different parts of a website?

Does a site with sitelinks for a keyword phrase have more authority than a site with sitelinks for their domain name?

In a previous thread [webmasterworld.com], Google said:

If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks... we won't show them.

So there is a site architecture issue here? But it also says:

...or we don't think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

How does Google mostly determine relevancy besides inbound links?

So the questions.

• Do sitelinks mean you have a well optimized inbound link strategy plus good site architecture, but not necessarily authoritative?

• Or do sitelinks simply mean your site is authoritative?

[Receptional Andy]

IMO you're more likely to get sitelinks if your site is considered in some way authoritative for the keyword. I reckon it's similar to the adding of pre-fetches to top results - a high enough percentage of users who type the keywords will click on that site - hence brand name terms being most common to trigger sitelinks.

Personally, I don't think external inbound links are much of a factor, and that site structure dictates the links that are chosen to be sitelinks, but that doesn't necessarily reflect good architecture - I've seen plenty of sitelinks that reflect bad architecture. I think it reflects perceived prominence of a page within a site's internal link structure, with a bit of filtering added in.

Edit: doh! had external in the last sentence when I meant internal...

[edited by: Receptional_Andy at 6:34 pm (utc) on Aug. 23, 2008]

[zoltan]

martinibuster, no, I am not sure. what you presented here is an interesting point of view.
"So the questions.

* Do sitelinks mean you have a well optimized inbound link strategy plus good site architecture, but not necessarily authoritative?

* Or do sitelinks simply mean your site is authoritative?"

In my opinion, it should be a combination of both. However, if we are talking about a "well optimized inbound link strategy", this is a sign of black hat because google want us to only build our sites and don't concentrate on any link strategy. Wrong?

[edited by: tedster at 4:52 pm (utc) on Aug. 23, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]

[tedster]

Google has said quite a bit about Sitelinks, even though they haven't given away the whole algorithm (of course.) Here's a collecion of the top threads about Sitelinks [webmasterworld.com]. You can find it in Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

Somewhere in my recent reading, I even saw a hint from Google about traffic being part of the sitelinks algo - something about "the links on your home page that get the most use." If I can locate the exact comment, I'll share it.

[Lorel]

The pages on my site that get the most traffic are also in site links so I believe that is true, plus I believe age is a big factor.

[ChicagoFan67]

I agree about traffic being an important factor and less so, inbound links. For my image site, sitelinks almost directly correlate to those directories which get the most hits.

I have a couple of image directories for very old titles with next to no inbound links to them. I was surprised to find Google gave me sitelinks for these. I can only account for it from the fact that at various points in time, these directories have received a lot of forum traffic. As the forum traffic diminished, the site links to them disappeared.

I have another directory listed in the sitelinks that is not as popular hitwise, but it is one of the oldest on the site and gets more traffic from google for a much wider range of related search phrases.

In a couple of instances, title's for the sitelinks appear to have been generated from a page of alphabetical listings.

[martinibuster]

The pages on my site that get the most traffic...

sitelinks almost directly correlate to those directories which get the most hits.

And those pages/sections have no inbound links from the outside?

[Marcia]

>>How does Google mostly determine relevancy besides inbound links?

Themes? Category based PR?

On one site with sitelinks that I'm looking at, going by what's grey TBPR and what isn't and what the Google selected sitelinks are, those are the factors involved beyond a shadow of a doubt, looking at the site as a whole.

[ChicagoFan67]

And those pages/sections have no inbound links from the outside?

No, they have some inbound links - mostly to internal image pages from boards and forums and occasionally, social networking sites and blogs. Many of these forums don't appear in google's index, however.

[edited by: ChicagoFan67 at 5:46 am (utc) on Aug. 24, 2008]

[Marcia]

I've got a site with sitelinks, with about 12-14 pages in one sub-directory, some of which have the sitelinks. The ones that do are much more closely related to the topic that the site has the sitelinks for than the pages that don't.

The site name doesn't have them, and there are no external links to any of those pages. The pages with the sitelinks all show TBPR, the ones that don't have none showing; they've just gone grey-barred recently.

Added: all those pages are absolutely on topic, none aren't; but the ones with the sitelinks are just more closely and more specifically related.

[edited by: Marcia at 12:19 pm (utc) on Aug. 24, 2008]

[tedster]

Interesting observation there, Marcia. I have one site that is showing a similar pattern, but just for most of the subdirectories - there are still two directories that retain PR even though they don't have sitelinks.

And a second site I just checked, where the Sitelinks are not the main directories - it has PR in the directories. The issue here is that the home page has an unusual page structure, so the sitelinks Google chose come from the top of the source code, not the main menu.