Decoding the Google Sitelinks Enigma

Ever since Google introduced sitelinks two years ago, it remains a mystery to this day how one website shows sitelinks and the other none. What do we do to get the coveted sitelinks and why should we care?

First things first, what are sitelinks? Sitelinks is a term coined by Google to refer to the set of links that shows below some sites in the Google search results. It appears below a particular website offering more links to that website instantly without even leaving the Google search page.

In essence, it makes life of the searcher one click faster as they are “meant to help users navigate (a) site… that will save time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.”

Very well but how do we get them to appear on ours? Unfortunately after 2 years since they started implementing it, only a handful of blog sites has it while most popular company sites seem to be enjoying the added feature.

Google’s Take

Google’s explanation is short and vague: “Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts… If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them… Sitelinks are completely automated.”

Why should we care? because Google is saying that: “we only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.” Ergo, if your site doesn’t carry sitelinks it means that your site isn’t important enough to have them! It means simply that your site doesn’t show any useful links so we will ignore putting them below your site in search pages. Our blog is less than a year old and doesn’t carry sitelinks; of course one day we hope to have that extra bonus from Google! Right now, from our Google webmaster tools links section it says “Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site.” Ouch!

Curious about a particular site we’re secretly following, we typed the keywords “John Chow” and was greatly surprised to find that his website johnchow.com is nowhere on the first 20-30 site results and so we clicked and clicked some more and there it was on the sixth page! Interestingly all the other 60 results shows his name being capitalized upon with johncow.com showing on the very first page at the top with sitelinks and all to boot! How did that happen? Only Google can answer.

Factors affecting sitelinks display

From our random search of keywords, here’s what we found out on those with sitelinks:

1. The site must rank no.1 on that keyword. Amazon, ebay, Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc. all have sitelinks and they’re no.1 on the result.

Our main keywords “Blogs That Follow” show us at no. 2 in search but even the no.1 doesn’t have sitelinks on its result.

2. Keywords with one or two words and rank no.1 on it seem to show sitelinks more than those with 3 or more keywords. “Yahoo!,” “Yahoo Directory,” “web awards,” “tshirt design,” “Pandora radio” have sitelinks. Keywords “make money online,” “Blogs that Follow,” “Do Follow Directory,” don’t.

3. Only websites with huge traffic (maybe based roughly on PageRank, Page views, backlinks, authority, etc.) will display sitelinks.

4. Age of site will be a factor as well. The older your site is, the more credibility you have on the web. We think two year old sites and below will not get sitelinks. Then again, it may be case to case depending on how much a website gets for traffic in its first 24 months being online.

5. The number of indexed pages counts! and the more popular that page is, the more likely it will appear as part of a sitelink. Our best bet is that links appearing on our navigation menu either as pages or pure links to articles, are the most likely to appear as sitelinks.

Bottomline

We all want that credibility and branding that associates with sitelinks. From an ordinary searcher or reader’s standpoint, the site with sitelinks appear more “trusting” than the ones without it.

While sitelinks have been discussed and explained time and again since it first appeared on Google search, there is still no way to decipher for sure what goes on with Google system analytics responsible for discriminating one site over another in displaying sitelinks. We can only follow the 5 guidelines we came up with and continue blogging and hope for the best!

Sitelinks info also appear on Google’s Webmaster Help center.