Comments on: 6 Educated Theories Behind Google SiteLinks

By: Laughing Loud

Laughing Loud — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:12:41 +0000

Can you please explain what is Web 3.0 you’ve mentioned.

By: J B

J B — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:33:58 +0000

Good article.
I’ve played around with sitelinks on all of my sites fort the last 3 months and I’ve been getting nowhere.
I’ll be following your points to see if I can get any improvements.

By: Andy

Andy — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:29:31 +0000

Very good article … In fact I checked my site which is also showing a sitemap and some finding s fit – but not all – to the points you mention. I´m referring here to the keyword “Alopezie” (hair loss) and the site alopezie.de, which is a German site about hair loss. Hope its OK to mention here, but you have nofollow in any case…

Coming back to the selction of Google. They seemed to pick a quite interesting choice and mixture of pages.

The first column has four links to 4 (out of 6 in total) forums on the website. The selection is OK, the minor forums are left out. This seemed to be done NOT by hand, as a quite strange abbreviation “Allg.” is used (abbreviation for “general”), which is pretty misleading without knowing what is behind. So I assume they had used clicks or visitors numbers to select these forums.

The second column of sitelinks is a strange mixture from other places of my website, 3 links are related to content, one to “help on the forum” (for what sense I don´t know ??).

The 3 links to content are fitting pretty well, how they have been selected ?? – I don´t know … other things are not listed

1. Surfers oriented:
Yes, the selection makes sense (with the limitation of the title and the strange link to help on Forums)

2. Domain-authority oriented
Yes, the domains is exactly the keyword

3. Internal-architecture oriented
Only partly. The forums are well visible on the site, the other 4 links are very hard to find

4. On-page SEO oriented
Clearly NO, 3 links are horribly bad (Which supports my opinion, that Google does not need SEO-friendly links …)

5. Brand-strength oriented
Yes, this is clearly fitting, anyhow I doubt that played a role here.

6. Competition oriented
Yes, few competition here. In fact currently place 1 + 2 are take from the site.

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:25:21 +0000

Oh yes, that slipped my mind… Yeah, not enough control but still we have one… Chris, thank you for reminding me of it…

By: chris boggs

chris boggs — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:09:48 +0000

yep what ciaran said. you also have the option to add comments as to why you asked for the removal, which I have tested to nicely ask for replacements. So far not enough changes in sitelinks (only one round a couple months ago when they updated them) for me to tell how much effect those requests may have.

By: Ciaran

Ciaran — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:06:24 +0000

“what do you mean by “testing the sitelinks tool in Google Webmaster Tools”? All I know about it is that it either shows sitelinks or not…”

Once you have sitelinks, whilst you can’t tell Google what pages you want to show as links, if you don’t like any of the pages it does choose as links you can set them not to show as sitelinks – I did this with my profile page

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:54:37 +0000

@chris boggs: very good posts – thanks for sharing… Also, what do you mean by “testing the sitelinks tool in Google Webmaster Tools”? All I know about it is that it either shows sitelinks or not…

@Ciaran: thanks for sharing your Apple-related comments. I tend to agree with them.

I would love to see more comments on sitelinks behavior depending on geo location. Any international webmasters?

By: Keyclicks UK

Keyclicks UK — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 13:50:48 +0000

Interesting and useful post on a subject we often get asked about. I’d also agree with the point made by your last commentator:
“I’d suggest that it’s a mix of internal architecture, in-bound links (in determining what links show) and whether your site is clearly related to the search terms (when determining whether you have them at all)”

By: Ciaran

Ciaran — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:35:04 +0000

Hi Ann,

Nice post, and certainly some interesting thoughts. User behaviour may well be something to do with that, but I actually think that the Apple example is more proof of internal architecture being a factor (as the page that is important to the UK, apple.com/uk is a sub directory).

I tend to think that it’s a mixture of these things. We have site links for Altogether (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=altogether+digital&pws=0&hl=en&num=10) and originally one of those shown was my profile page. Now I don’t think that’s a particularly popular page, but as I write many of the posts it was probably one with a large number of internal site links.

I’d suggest that it’s a mix of internal architecture, in-bound links (in determining what links show) and whether your site is clearly related to the search terms (when determining whether you have them at all)

By: chris boggs

chris boggs — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:10:32 +0000

Sorry but 6 has no chance. Primary example that shuts that one down: “carinsurancerates.com” getting sitelinks for the search for “auto insurance.” This is an extremely competitive term. Others like that which IMO don’t deserve the love come up for searches for “health insurance” and “fitness club.”