GUIDE TO OPTIMIZING SITELINKS
In order to ensure the sitelinks feature is displaying the appropriate links for your site we’ve put together the following recommendations. While this process used to be as simple as demoting wrongly displayed links Google has since removed that functionality and now determines sitelinks by requiring sites to follow a set of best practices. Once these best practices are followed user behavior (such as time spent on a page, how often it’s accessed, etc.) will be a major factor in which pages appear in sitelinks.
How Sitelinks Labels Are Determined
- Anchor text pointing to the page from internal or external links
- Search queries for which the page was returned as a result, especially if it was either in the first or subsequent top ten position
- Search queries for which the page was clicked upon from search results
- Key phrases extracted from social bookmarking tags
How to Get Desired Pages to Display in Sitelinks
- Ensure your website has a clear structure, uses relevant internal links and anchor text that’s informative, compact and avoids duplication
- Make sure you are linking to category and/or subcategory pages that you want to show up in the sitelinks feature from elsewhere on the site, such as related blog posts
- If you haven’t done so already, submit an up to date sitemap
- If any of the pages currently displaying in sitelinks should not be showing up in search at all submit a support ticket and we can discuss ways to block them from being indexed entirely