Google Sitelinks: An In-Depth Look and Analysis

December 8, 2008 by Pablo Palatnik

Google Sitelinks. One of the mysteries to SEOs still remains a mystery today because of the lack of transparency by Google to understand how these sitelinks are generated, but moreso, WHO gets these sitelinks on the SERPs for search results.

Image Source: SearchEngineJournal.com

I’ll use two sources to start this post about Google sitelinks and from there, start analyzing some of this research and thoughts. The two sources are: 1) “The Missing Sitelinks” in the OMMA October 2008 issue written by Kerry Dean and 2) “6 Educated Theories Behind Google SiteLinks” on Search Engine Journal by Ann Smarty.

As Dean explains it, “Sitelinks are relevant keywords (linked, of course, to an appropriate URL) that appear directly beneath the top ranking (search result), giving the searcher a shortcut to the pages that Google is betting are most relevant to your search.” You can see this by the illustration above or you can Google a domain name such as eBay.com in Google and you will see site links there.

Straight from the Google Webmaster Blog, they describe Google Sitelinks as such:

“The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

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.

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.”

The two sources I’ve cited above have similar and different theories and how these sitelinks are automated by Google.

Kerry Deans article:

Sitelinks are generated by a websites main overall popularity, domain authority and brand popularity. He states if your site is ranked number one for a search term, you have good possibilities of Google creating site links in its search results. Other factors include: Optimized internal link structure, optimal anchor text in all links on the site, solid SEO implementation for all pages and on-page factors, and competition of the vertical.

Ann Smartys Article:

This article as it states in the title, is more based on theories than research. The first theory is Surfers oriented, “Sitelinks are given to a site when it “satisfies a great number of people who make that particular query” (mentioned here).

This theory can be considered officially supported by Google: We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.”

Other theories include: Domain-authority oriented, Internal-architecture oriented, On-page SEO oriented, Brand-strength oriented, and Competition oriented.

OK, so it seems both agree on pretty much everything that includes the authority of your domain, internal link structure, on-page SEO factors, competition, and brand strength.

So, let’s look at some websites in our vertical who have sitelinks and for what keyword? It seems most sitelinks are generated from entering the domain name in the Google search box. Coca-Cola being the biggest soft drink company in the world does not generate sitelinks for the keyword soft drinks but it does for the keyword coca cola or cocacola.com. The same goes for eBay. If you Google auction or auction sites, you won’t get eBay with sitelinks but you will if you type eBay or eBay.com in Google.

So, yes, one can conclude that Google generates these sitelinks and only show them in results when the brand or domain name are typed in for faster navigation for the searcher.

Let’s look at Sphinn.com, SearchEngineJournal.com, MattCutts.com, Problogger.net, and SEOBook.com. By looking at certain factors, we may be able to concluce certain things about what Google is measuring in order for it to create sitelinks. Note: All these website show up with sitelinks in search results for their brand keyword such as Googling “Sphinn” or “Pro Blogger”.

ProBlogger.net:
PageRank: 6
Indexed URL by Goog: 7,070
Domain Age: Feb 05, 2005

Sphinn.com:
PageRank: 6
Indexed URL by Goog: 67,800
Domain Age: Apr 28, 2007

Search Engine Journal:
PageRank: 6
Indexed URL by Goog: 9,250
Domain Age: Jul 26, 2003

SEOBook.com:
PageRank: 6
Indexed URL by Goog: 6,160
Domain Age: Oct 10, 2003

MattCutts.com:
PageRank: 7
Indexed URL by Goog: 1,290
Domain Age: Apr 04, 2004

So, let’s see. All websites have:
1) PageRank of 6 or higher.
2) Over 1,000 pages indexed by Google.
3) Over a year of age on the domain.

As I took a look in Googles Webmaster Tools for this blog, Google has in fact already created sitelinks for PalatnikFactor.com but they are not showing up in the SERP for the keyword “Palatnik Factor” or “PalatnikFactor.com” yet. From this post, I suspect it may show these sitelinks for those keywords when the PageRank increases a bit (the domain holds more authority) and the blog itself grows a bit bigger in size indexing over 1k pages in Google.