You might have seen them, you might not. You may take them for granted or you may just not use them. Google Sitelinks are a familiar sight on many search results these days, ever since they first started appearing back in mid-2006. For those still not quite sure, they are the links you sometimes see on google search results, right below the search result URL, cached and similar links.

They typically include links to different regions of the site; in the example screenshot here it shows the top search result for ‘google’ on google.co.uk. You can clearly see the additional Sitelinks pointing to areas of the site such as the Google Images search engine, Google shopping and Google Maps. The idea is to provide useful links to areas of the target site that users may want to visit directly

But how do these links appear here? Who/what controls them? Well, the first thing to note is that they only appear for the top search result in any given search; they don’t appear below that. Secondly, no-one actually controls these links; they are the result of a Google algorithm (no surprises there!).

There has been much discussion on the internet over the past 2 to 3 years since its trialing/inception regarding how the links are generated. Most of this talk is just hearsay, the actual working methodology behind getting sitelinks up for your #1 ranking site can be somewhat trial and improvement, the latter being the most significant here.

How can I get them on my site?

Improving ones site seems to be a strong contender when it comes to getting Sitelinks to appear in your site’s results. Only when your site has enough authority will Sitelinks appear in search results, having inbound links carrying authority to your site will help better your chances of Google’s algorithm noticing your site.

This algorithm looks at your site’s structure and tries to locate the most relevant sections of the site to link to. If your site’s structure is tied in closely with the main navigation, it may be possible to have the more important sections of you site appear as the chosen Sitelinks.

Can they be altered?

It may be that if your site carries a lot of authority in a particular area, it will be more likely to appear in the Sitelinks. If this is the case, Google provides a useful tool to remove unwanted Sitelinks from #1 search results for your site. In Google Webmaster Tools, under Site Configuration, there’s a ‘Sitelinks’ section. Here, you can remove unwanted Sitelinks from your site, making space for more relevant Sitelinks and/or the Sitelinks that you want.

Google have stated that they are always trying to improve the functionality of the Sitelinks algorithm and that at some point in the future, they plan to allow the creation of Sitelinks by webmasters themselves.

From Google Webmaster Central on Sitelinks, “At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.”

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