Google Sitelinks Show Off Your SEO Efforts!
by Dave Maloney
You may have never heard of them, but Google sitelinks have been around for a few years. You may have even used them in your web searches and not even noticed them. Google sitelinks are the list of links that is displayed beneath a search result to help users find what they're looking for within that website. Usually Google site links are only displayed for search terms of a company's name or brand, but they can appear for other keyword phrases that a site ranks well for. Just this week, Google unveiled their latest updated version of sitelinks, intended to further improve the quality and organization of search results.
Up until now, Google sitelinks were displayed like this, the blue links below the main result in a search for "Pagetender":
Now when searching for "Pagetender" the sitelinks are displayed like this:
Google Sitelinks - more results, more detail
While Google's underlying algorithms for providing the most relevant results haven't been changed, the way they are displayed just got better for both searchers and site owners. Site links are a now larger font size and show the page URL in green with a truncated version of the page's meta description, just like regular search results. This makes pages easier to find for searchers while gives each page a better chance to tell what it has to offer. Previously, webpages could appear in your search results in the sitelinks or as regular results below (or both); now the results are much clearer: all results from one domain are displayed under one result as sitelinks.
Previously, Google only displayed 8 sitelinks below a result, and those links never changed. Now there are 12 slots available, which can now vary which child pages are displayed depending on what search terms are used.
Google Sitelinks and All Your Hard SEO Work...
Do an organic search for your business and see what comes up for your Google site links, you'll find it interesting!
- How well have you done with your SEO and optimizing your pages?
- Do your page meta descriptions need a little tweaking?
- Are what Google decides are your most authoritive pages the ones you consider the most important?
- Are there pages in your site links that you'd rather not have displayed at the top? While you can't tell Google what pages to show in your results, Google does offer an option to demote ones you think are less important to viewers (like an old blog post or outdated announcement). Just follow the instructions on Google Webmaster Tools Sitelinks.
We may never understand exactly how Google decides which of your pages is more important than the next, but don't give up hope! Do some experimenting with your SEO and make some changes, then check your results again (changes in search engines won't be instant, you have to wait to have your pages crawled again). In inbound marketing, just like everything else, if you keep doing the same thing (or if you keep doing nothing), you'll keep getting the same results!
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