Google SiteLinks – Why do they appear and how are they generated?
You may have noticed that from time to time, the top result in Google has a series of links nested under the main result. This doesn’t happen for every #1 result but when it does happen its really handy for users and great as an SEO if it happens to be one of your clients! As an example, try searching for dabs and check out result #1. Until recently nobody really knew where these strange things (known by Google as SiteLinks) came from or how you got them to appear under your result listing. Google have now updated thier webmaster guidelines to include some information on why and how these SiteLinks appear:
"We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. 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."
What I understand from this is that you’ll get SiteLinks applied to your listing if you’re ranked #1 and your site is well built. By well built I mean valid, semantic, clean html that doesn’t use some whacky javascript trickery to power your nav/links. I also mean well built in terms of site architecture – is your site divided into logical parts.
There’s a thread going on at the WebMasterWorld forums about this topic for anyone wanting more info.
Technorati Tags: Google, SEO, SiteLinks, webmaster guidelines, semantic, javascript
Syndication
