Well. it's certainly worth a toast or two. Congrats, it is a healthy sign. Google has been expanding their sitelinks awards recently, but they still don't hand them out to any old junk.

Wait a few days before you celebrate though, I 've seen sitelinks in and out on some sites recently. this week end, it's in for all of them. Better if it sticks.

If you are in the UK the sitelinks algo is broke.

Cheers

Sid

In these days I noted that is easier to get sitelinks.

Sme sites show sitelinks just searching for the Url, other sites searching for some keywords and other site only searching for their "brand name" or the name they appear in directories like Yellow pages.

My sitelinks were on for a few weeks and then disappeared two days ago. I'm in the US but I think it's hard to say if this is regional.

Sitelinks is a great visual if your audience are searching those terms that invoke them. Its typically a company name search that returns sitelinks.

Can you believe that I've run into a few people who see the sitelinks and think that it is part of Google's own results. They scroll down below the sitelinks and choose from there. Sitelinks are alien to many and the way they are formatted may have the opposite intended effect.

I had them a while now but they changed radically about a week ago. Previously, they were showing country specific subdirectories on my static content... now they only show links to country sub forums on my forum.
I guess that means the algo thinks my forum has grown and is more important than the static content. Fine by me, I guess.

Note that you can exclude pages from your SiteLinks using the Google Webmaster Tools; Under Links->SiteLinks, select the SiteLink that you don't like, and click the "Block" link to the right of it.

They've done a good job on my sites, so I'm not sure specifically how this works. Also, it appears that you have to block SiteLink URLs one-by-one, so this may be a problem for the "country subforums" you mention if you have a lot of them.

Jim

The bulk of my search traffic comes to the user generated content and I'm very limited in the time I can spend writing fresh static content... so, I guess it's a good thing the algo has chosen to promote the forum country sections... I think I'll leave things as they are for now.

However, one of the sitelinks chosen is a specific thread and I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Site links special? I've got a site that has site links, yet only gets about 70 visitors a day. Always thought it was how I had structured the site.

Traffic doesn't seem to matter; What seems to matter is whether you get searches specific to your site, as in searches for your company name, site name, brand name, etc. -- i.e. people trying to find your site specifically, and whether your site is "authoritative" for those searches. SiteLinks seem to be granted and appear in SERPs for those searches for which your site has no (or very little) authoritative competition.

Jim

One of my clients had a sitelink that pointed to a very obscurre page - they requested a deletion and it happened with no trouble. But that particular issue highlighted a problem with their entire "mouseover" menu system - the same menu label appeared in three different places! That one little strange sitelink has now generated a major project to re-structure their entire information architecture.

Another client has sitelinks for a single generic keyword. That's a very startling event, since there are 16 million results currently reported, and the keyword triggers many Adwords plus a Google Shopping OneBox at the top of the SERP. In other words, there are serious competitors who must be furious about those sitelinks.

One factor I'm watching with strong interest it how the sitelinks algo generates the menu labels. In one case, I see "Click here for all widgets" - Google has added the "click here for" part. That doesn't appear on the page anywhere on the site, not even in an alt attribute.

Tedster > Some time ago I saw a sitelink which contained a 'Back' link like this: javascript:history.go(-1);

I still wonder why the algo decided to implement that kind of link as a sitelink.

[edited by: OutdoorMan at 5:25 pm (utc) on April 27, 2008]

Hehe - early bugs, I assume. Funny things happen with any automated process, as a Xenu crawl of many sites will demonstrate.

I've seen some sitelinks disasters along the way for sites that redirect their domain root to an internal url, too - not the best of ideas for several reasons.

Do you mean early bugs in sitelinks algo or a bug in the website itself? (it's not more than one or two months ago I last noticed it)

Could it possibly be the webmasters own choice of a sitelink, do you think?

I thought "some time ago" meant farther back than that. At any rate, that would be a bad result from the algo. No way Google should want that choice.

Could it possibly be the webmasters own choice of a sitelink, do you think?

Webmasters cannot proactively suggest or choose sitelinks, only delete those that the algorithm has already selected.

Sorry, I should have been more specific ;)

I tried a search for the same keyword. The search still returns sitelinks for the very same site, but it no longer has the 'Back' link. Now it's sitelinks show some language choise links and a sitemap link.

It seems like Google have adjusted the sitelinks for this site/keyword.

Webmasters cannot proactively suggest or choose sitelinks, only delete those that the algorithm has already selected.

Ok, I didn't knew that -- So far none of my sites have sitelinks.

Are sitelinks a sign of "authority" on a given term?

Depends on how you define "authority". I'd say sitelinks indicate that the site satisfies a great number of people who make that particular query - a significantly greater number than the average #1 site on the average search. That's my current operating assumption, at least.

I have seen an example of a site with sitelinks that got a -60 penalty. There it was sitting at position #61, but sitelinks were still showing!

Hi,

In my niche sites that rank tend to be intraspective, they encourage links in but give very few out and almost never have out-links on their home pages.

The site at #1 is very different, it has bought roughly the same number of in-links as the old established sites have gathered over the years but is structured like this. The home page points to pages on the companies that supply the key search term and to semantically linked things. From each of those pages is an affiliate link to the site of one of the firms trying to compete for top 10 spots. Of course none of those sites link to it. As a result this site is #1 with site links for the most competitive term in our market and is taking commission from the very sites that it is keeping off top spot.

I hope that the mods will allow me this example. I've been trying to understand why Microsoft has site links with a site search box but Apple Computer doesn't get site links. Both have a PR of 9. Microsoft has out links from its home page to a different domain and to sub domains. Apple just has folders within the one domain and seems to have no out links from the next level down from the root.

I know of sites that have no out links on their home page or one level down but do get sitelinks for their brand name search. So this cannot be the only factor but I think it is important.

Cheers

Sid

I've been trying to understand why Microsoft has site links with a site search box but Apple Computer doesn't get site links.

Apple does have sitelinks for me - and has for a long time. I see them for both the [Apple] and [Apple Computer] searches.

Is your question more about the site search box? That's a relatively new innovation, and the logic behind when it gets assigned is a bit mysterious to me, so far at least.

Hi Tedster,

On google.co.uk Apple has no site links, I see it does on .com sorry I was searching for an example that fitted my argument and shot from the hip as soon as I found one. I was working on the hypothesis that "Authority site deserving of site links for a competitive term" might, in part be related to linking structure with other sites. Authorities tend to have more outlinks than merchants and therefore it might be possible to trigger the sitelink algo by using a structure including outlinks to sites on the same topic.

Whilst it may be interesting that the UK filter changes things it doesn't push the discussion further.

Cheers

Sid

I have observed at the start two of my sites with "site links" did not get them when I did a search from a every machine on my in house network. After a couple of weeks this changed, then on a recent trip to another city I ran some Google searches and found one of the sites did not get the "site links" - back home everything was as normal.