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What are Google Sitelinks? Google Sitelinks are displayed in Google search results and are meant to help users navigate your website. Google systems analyze the link structure of your website to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information. Sitelinks are completely automated by Google’s algorithm. In short, Google Sitelinks are shortcuts to your main pages from the search result pages. When do Google Sitelinks show? Google only shows Sitelinks for results when they think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your website doesn’t allow Google spider to find good Sitelinks, or they don’t think the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, they won’t show them. Although there are no certain answers to this question from Google, the following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not: Your site must have a stable no.1 ranking for the search query. So Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names. Your site must be old enough. It seems that websites under 2 years old don’t get Sitelinks The number of searches - it seems that the search keywords aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks The number of clicks - it seems that your site has to get many clicks for the searched keywords It seems that Sitelinks don’t show to search queries consisting of two or more keywords The number of links - links are important everywhere in the SEO world, aren’t they? The inbound links with the relevant anchor text seems to influence the chance of getting Sitelinks How can we get Sitelinks for our website? If you can meet the above mentioned criteria, you’ll have a big chance to get Sitelinks shown for your site. But you can also improve the structure of your website to increase the possibility and quality of your Sitelinks. Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks, so make sure all your important links are on the homepage. The links should be text links or image links with an IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Also, it seems that Google likes links that appear at the top of a webpage. So try to put your important links at the top of the HTML code and then re-position using CSS. Overall, build your website following SEO best practices and rank no.1 for your most important keywords will ensure the Sitelinks appearances and help users to navigate your website.

Q: I’m worried that someone will buy links to my site and then report that. A: We’ve always tried very hard to prevent site A from hurting site B. That’s why these reports aren’t being fed directly into algorithms, and are being used as the starting point rather than being used directly. You might also want to review the policy mentioned in my 2005 post (individual links can be discounted and sellers can lose their ability to pass on PageRank/anchortext/etc., which doesn’t allow site A to hurt site B).

If we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting for a second, maybe we can openly talk about the bigger story of last week’s SMX Advanced. The one that has to do with Matt Cutts taking the stage during the You&A and openly stating that Google profiles SEOs like common criminals. I was naïve in my youth. I’d read blog posts that accused Google of “having it out” for SEOs and laugh. There’d be rants about how Google was stricter on sites that were clearly touched by an SEO and how SEOs were dumb for “self-identifying” with attributes like nofollow. At the time, I thought these people were insane. Now I know they were right. Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.

How Google Can Discover Paid Links A while back I did a post called 15 Methods for Paid Link Detection. Here is a list of the methods I discussed in that post: Links Labeled as Advertisements Site Wides Links Are Sold By a Link Agency Selling Site Has Information on How to Buy a Text Link Ad Relevance of Your Link Relevance of Nearby Links Advertising Location Type Someone Reports Your Site for Buying Links Someone Reports Your Site for Some Other Reason Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Selling Links Someone Reports the Site you Bought Links from for Some Other Reason Disgruntled Employee Leaves Your Company, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Agency Your Used, and Reports Your Site Disgruntled Employee Leaves the Company of the Site You Bought Links from, and Reports Your Site Internal Human Review There are two major methods I want to emphasize here. These are: 1. Your competitor can report you. It's the grim truth that your paid links can be reported by your competitor. There is a form built right into Google Webmaster Tools. Here is what it looks like: