Number of Elements within Site Links in SERPs

[Alon]

I note that when you type your company name for example <snip>

the search results is showing 6 elements -

Our site used to show 6 elements and now is showing four elements

can anyone suggest the reasons for that

[edited by: aakk9999 at 9:12 am (utc) on Aug 9, 2013]
[edit reason] Removed specifics as per ToS [/edit]

[aakk9999]

These "elements" are called sitelinks. Generally these have 2 formats: large sitelinks (or Mega sitelinks) under the first listing, where each sitelink has also a meta description shown underneath. Mega sitelinks can come as a pack of 4, 6, 8 or 10 and are presented in two columns under the first entry of search results in SERPs. Google generates these automatically, depending on how useful Google thinks internal pages are for the user and the query. You can find more on these here: [support.google.com...]

There are also "mini sitelinks" (also refered as "one-line sitelinks" or "inline sitelinks") where Google displays three or four links within the same line, under the search result entry. These may be shown for the first entry in SERPs but also for second or third etc. entry in SERPs. In fact there could be more than one SERP entry showing mini sitelinks. You can find more on these here: [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk...]

We also had a few discussion on sitelinks in this forum:
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

You can probably find more threads on this if you use Search function of WebmasterWorld.

As for the reason why your site shows 4 sitelinks, if you are referring to Mega Sitelinks, then it is probably that Google has decided that only these four further pages are what searches may also look for when searching for your company name. Alternatively, it could be that the structure of your site does not allow Google to find other entries to be displayed as sitelinks.