Nora Brown Design

Google Sitelinks

A couple of clients have asked me about Google sitelinks — the list of links that appear with the first search result for some sites. Unfortunately, which websites get them and which links are listed is part of Google’s “secret sauce,” if you will. They won’t tell you what factors they use to generate sitelinks, much less let you designate them yourself.

Common traits

There are some commonalities among sites that have sitelinks. Generally, they:

• Are fairly high-traffic
• Are well-established, and have been around for a while
• Have many incoming links (other sites linking to them)

So besides generating more traffic and links to your site (which of course you want to do anyway), you should have simple, text-based navigation on your homepage to help Google generate sitelinks.

Sitelinks are nice, but not critical

I’ve noticed that sitelinks are most often shown for searches where Google seems fairly certain that the first result is the one the searcher is looking for. For example, in a search for “Wordpress,” Wordpress.org is the first search result, and sitelinks are displayed. However, in a search for “Wordpress themes”, a page on Wordpress.org is still the top result, but no sitelinks are shown. This is only one of four search modes, and it’s more important to rank well for key search terms than it is to have sitelinks in the search result.

To me, this means that it’s not as important as you might think to have sitelinks, because they are only being shown when the searcher already knows what she wants.

Further reading

• Google Webmasters sitelinks info
• Google Webmasters Blog article on sitelinks
• A look at Google’s patent app for sitelinks