Hungry for Sitelinks
Boohoo. It seems that we do not have the sitelinks yet even though David Eaves recently noticed a huge update in Google sitelinks.
For those who do not know what sitelinks are, they are simply the links that appear (for some sites) in Google’s SERPs. Here’s a a list of links to some search results with sitelinks:
As you see the links reflect the site’s structure showing the main pages, which for Neopets include the login form, the games room, the map, etc. According to Google the purpose of sitelinks is to help users navigate websites straight from Google SERPs so that they can go directly to the site section where they will find the information they need instead of having to go to your homepage and navigate from there. Obviously sitelinks are cool because they add to your site’s overall usability. It is also desirable because it is reflects the fact that your site has a site structure that Google’s present algorithm can interpret.
In case you don’t have any sitelink (like us) do not despair. According to Google they are improving they are working to improve their sitelink algorithm. In the meantime if you want to get sitelinks you’d better:
- keep apostrophes and other punctuation (like hyphens) out of your company name and domain name - Read Michael Grey’s post on Site Links ans Search Volume
- not transfer to a new domain - Site age seems to be a factor for getting sitelinks.
- work on your link building campaign to gain authority - Since this is what you do anyway this simply means continuing your SEO efforts.
- review your site structure - If you have a huge site maybe it is time to figure out whether your site structure makes sense. Make sure categories are defined and that all pages fall under a specific category.
- increase brand awareness - According to Randfish sitelink creation may depend on brand search query volume as well as popularity of brand/domain mentions on pages across the world wide web.
- work on individual pagerank for important pages. If only one of the pages in your site has a high page rank chances are you won’t get sitelinks since Google’s algorithm only show sitelinks for results which they deem would be useful to the user.
Today is May 13, 2008
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Yeah we had them for about three months and just recently lost them (I think it’s because we added some new sections for expansion and built them up?). They were showing up in our Google webmaster account but never made it to the search engine results
Just build links to the main sections of your site so that you can clearly tell Google which sections are most important e.g. if you have an SEO site build tons of links to your tools, tips, blog, articles etc..