I believe I can shed alot of light on Sitelinks and what google does to determine them. I started promoting a website in October of 2008 (http://www.uotreasures.com). We currently have sitelinks for our main keyword term, "Ultima Online Gold". At the time I started promoting the site, it had a hold on the #1 spot (which it has consistently had for years), but thats it. I first decided that I wanted to "double dip" the serps, taking spot #1 and #2. To do this, I found the next page on the website that ranked for that term and started building backlinks to it with the "Ultima Online Gold" anchor text. As expected, in a short period of time it slipped into the top 10, and as a result this page instantly became #2 (Google grouped the 2nd page immediately under the 1st page). I have some healthy competition for this particular keyword, and as a result I found myself continually having to build backlinks to the main site, as well as to my 2ndary link. Then one day ... we got our sitelinks. Now is where it gets interesting. I thought to myself "wow I have sitelinks now! I don't want to lose those babies!" Now understand, my site is like a 1 trick pony. Just about all we sell is Ultima Online Gold, sure there's a couple more things ... but not 8 sitelinks worth of things. As a result, we ended up with some pretty worthless sublinks, for instance -- one was to a contest we were running but that contest was over. But hey, if Google wants to blatantly show to everyone one of my more worthless pages stuck proudly as a sublink ... I'm not one to argue about it, thats fine Google! You can do that. Now I wanted these sitelinks to stay, I was worried I would lose them. So what I did ... every single one of these sitelinks, I changed the pages to rank for "Ultima Online Gold". I put the wording "Ultima Online Gold" in context on the bottom of the pages. I did external links to those pages using that as a keyword. I essentially made most of those sitelinks rank for the keyword in which I received the sublinks for. And then in about a month ... Google picked nearly a completely different set of sublinks. I started out with 7 sublinks, after beefing up these pages to rank for "Ultima Online Gold" about 5 of those switched to completely different pages. I'm pretty certain that when you are given sitelinks on a particular keyword, its because Google knows that most people searching for that keyword -- most often visit that site. Because we were #1 for so long on that keyword, and because we got the majority of people clicking through to our site based on that keyword, we got sitelinks. The sitelinks that Google gives to your site are to show diversity to the searcher. Google wants to give your visitors many different options, pages with different themes on your website. If you make every one of your sitelink urls rank very strongly for the keyword that gives you the sitelinks to begin with ... Google will swap them out and pick new pages on your website. So, based on my own experience, this is what you can do to control your own sitelinks ... Google gives you the ability to delete certain sitelinks. Most people wouldn't want to use this option (even though its not very relevant of a page, sitelinks show authority and you want people to see as many as possible). The best way to delete a sitelink is to take that particular page that got the sitelink ... then make it rank for the keyword you got sitelinks for. Then Google will decide the page isn't diverse enough and pick a new page. If you don't have 8 sitelinks, you want to make sure you have at least 8 very strong, well-linked-to, different themed pages as sitelinks. If a page turns up you don't want there, theme it for the keyword and Google will pick the next strongest diverse themed page on your site.
A great post from Kevin , green given! My intention is to analyse the sites here to see if anything common... but the most important thing i got from Kevins post here Which I personally believe is the key..... but ill keep an eye on thread for another while before starting analysis.. Want to get to the bottom of this one and Kevin has hit the nail on the head!..
I recently changed my blogspot URL into custom domain so I don't have any sitelinks for now but search for my Blogspot site you can still see my sitelinks http://www.google.com.ph/search?hl=en&q=botsnhacks.blogspot.com&btnG=Search&meta=
Well for ur experiment i would post these sites http://officeinfotips.blogspot.com && http://happy-funtime.blogspot.com on which i love reading jokes...
Thats cool ... whats a green? lol Anyways, here is an example of a page that used to be a sitelink, but isn't a sitelink anymore http://uotreasures.com/rares/ Notice the wording on the bottom. Everything from the H1 header "UO Gold" and below that, that did not exist when this page received a sitelink. I added that information, designed to make this page rank for "Ultima Online Gold" only after that page became a sitelink. This page got dropped thereafter and Google gave me another sitelink in its place. I think Google is confused right now about my site, which one it wants to make into sitelinks. I know how to make google NOT want to make a page a sitelink (thats by ranking it perfectly for the term you get the sitelink for). I know that I could solidify which 8 pages I wanted as sitelinks if I did this ... - Picked 8 pages on the site I want to be sitelinks - Make each page have absolutely nothing to do with the topic I'm getting the sitelink for, Google is looking for shortcuts to diverse things on your site - Strongly promote each page for the diverse keyword or theme that the sitelink keyword will be given Its also important to note that these two things -- Google giving you sitelinks -- Google picking which pages will be sitelinks, are two absolutely different things. You get sitelinks because your website is the one thats chosen most often when someone searches on a particular keyword. Your sitelinks get picked because your site is most often chosen ... but the pages that are selected typically have nothing to do with the keyword for which you receive the sitelinks for.
@Kevin I think your making a lot on game gold selling.. I like making a site like that but I don't have any idea on how game gold selling business operates.. @Topic Does loosing those sitelinks decreases your site traffic? I mean like what I did recently I moved my blogspot to a custom url
http://www.google.com/search?aq=-1&oq=&hl=da&q=hovedst%E6der&btnG=S%F8g&meta=&pws=0 Just recieved sitelinks - and already seeing traffic improvement
That does make sense, and stands to reason that Google would want to diversify the pages that are shown to you in the SERP's, I did say in another thread about sitelinks, that "I think it may have something to do with keeping the anchor text consistent throughout the site" But I also think it has something to do with the title of the page as well. My site has 8 sitelinks, 7 of the links are the anchor text I have (consistently) used throughout my site, but one of the sitelinks was the title of a page. I think Google decided to use the page title instead of the anchor text, was because the anchor text is to short (its "All") but that's just a guess. However, the one that was the title has just been replaced (in the last couple of days), by another anchor text from a different category. So I guess that Google will take whatever it thinks is best be it anchor text, or title tag (or part of either) @kevin 8 out of 9 pages I looked at on you site, have identical title tags I get sitelinks when someone searches for my URL keyword (uvrx), but I also get sitelinks for another phrase that is relevant to one of the sitelinks displayed. There is no difference how Google displays the results in either search, its always, my main URL and the sitelinks. So if what you're saying was true, then wouldn't Google leave out the sitelink that is relevant to the search term, and replace the main URL with the relevant page? Cheers James
One of my sitelinks is extremely relevant to my keyword (one with /gold subdirectory) and a 2nd one is too (it appears in last few days I got the "rules" page back). Something interesting to note about that Rules page, it used to be termed "Rules", then I linked to it half the time with "Ultima Online Gold", and then I linked to it the other half of the time with "UO Gold" (the two terms I wanted to rank that page for). For about 1 month it got swapped out ... but now its back and it shares both anchor texts of the major links I sent to that page, the anchor text "Ultima Online Gold, UO Gold". I'm thinking that if a page is promoted enough and has enough incoming links, it can be in sublinks even if it has the same theme as the keyword text. But maybe the page was selected because I tried to make it rank for "UO Gold" and thats a different keyword term than Ultima Online Gold. Anyways, 5 of the sublinks still got swapped out for making it themed and rank the same as the keyword, so I still think Google is looking for diverse pages.
Heres my link: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLJ_en&q=industry+finest&btnG=Search&meta= Good Luck!! Celebrity News
I used the hyper link and substituded my web sites name like above and it came back Results 1 - 10 of about 1,520 for digitalextrememediagroup. (0.30 seconds) Am I checking this right?
http://www.google.com/search?q=ibiza+seo+&pws=0&hl=en&num=10 anyone seriously trying to work this out should check out the comments on the sitelinks = authority? post here http://www.google.com/search?q=sitelinks+authority?&pws=0&hl=en&num=10
Nice post, great comments. I really liked the idea by Taree Internet (aka sweetfunny) about the suggestions Google gives. and that sort of ties in with my sitelinks as well.. not so much with the results in Google search, but more the related searches Google insight gives. interesting, thanks for the read. Cheers James
site 1) http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enUS308US308&q=comtec+ars site 2) http://www.google.com/search?source...GGLJ_enUS308US308&q=new+york+rangers+fan+club
no worries, glad you liked it. and yes indeed, I hadn't thought about that before but I definitely think Sweetfunny's onto something with that.