Sitelinks - how do you make them appear?

[James2]

Is there anything you can do to have sitelinks appear for your site in the SERP?

Or is this Google's decision?

[netmeg]

It's Google's. But it helps to make sure your navigation is clear, clearly marked, and that Google can detect it.

[mrmobility]

I just got given the honour of site links yesterday; they were only loosely based on my navigation though.

[JoePublisher]

Putting <nav> </nav> around your navigation links (HTML5 Code) seems to help, Google picks this up as a definite 'hint'.

From w3schools "The <nav> tag defines a section of navigation".

Example code they give

<nav>
<a href="default.asp">Home</a>
<a href="tag_meter.asp">Previous</a>
<a href="tag_noscript.asp">Next</a>
</nav>

Caveat: not a magic bullet .... but I have found it affective, given time.

[Alex_TJ]

Have everyone's sitelinks been based on text anchor links? Do images with alt vs text for nav menus have any impact on getting sitelinks or not?

[tedster]

One heck of a good question. I haven't worked with site that uses images for navigation links in a long time. I would assume that an alt attribute on those images would give Google the text it needs and make the job of assigning Sitelinks easier, but I've got no recent experience to back it up.

However, note that the choice of Sitelinks is a complex algorithm today. In some cases, I see Sitelinks that are not part of the main navigation, for example.

[Robert Charlton]

Do images with alt vs text for nav menus have any impact on getting sitelinks or not?

Yes, image nav-link alt text is one source. On one site I work with, where we have some text nav links and some image nav links, we've got Sitelinks derived from all of the following....

- text nav-link anchor text
- alt attributes of image nav-links
- destination page title (where text anchor is a synonym)
- Google-assigned text based on onpage phrase that the destination page ranks for

[Alex_TJ]

Thanks for the confirmation.
Our main site doesn't have sitelinks, even for its name, so it was worrying me. I'll try following Joe's suggestion of adding <nav> and see if that helps.