Google Revamps Sitelinks: Improvements and Expansion for Organic Search

When you’re searching on Google, you may often be looking for a specific piece of information or have a specific task in mind, such as searching for directions or hours of a local venue. Despite having a narrow search goal, many individuals browsing the web start off their search with a broad query with no mention of what they’re actually searching for. For these types of searches and to improve user experience, Google displays results with lists of links to specific sections of a website, referred to as “sitelinks”. Recently, Google has made several improvements to their sitelink layout regarding both looks and organization within search results.

When first launched, sitelinks were limited to just a single row of four links. Sitelinks are very useful because they can help visitors navigate to the correct (or most relevant) section of a website. This is particularly handy for large and complex sites – the Philadelphia zoo for example. Sitelinks also provide an excellent overview of a website’s content and allow webmasters to expose new areas of the site to visitors.

Google Improves Sitelinks

Because sitelinks are so helpful and useful, Google continues to improve and expand on their appearance and quality. Just recently, they’ve been arranged into a column of links for easier reading. Google also doubled the number of links for direct access into more areas of a website. Here’s what Google sitelinks looked like before the recent update:

And after:

As you can see, sitelinks are now full-sized links with a URL and one line text snippet beneath, similar to Google’s regular results. It’s now even easier to find the section of a website you’re looking for. The maximum number of sitelinks is now 12 (as opposed to the previous 8).

Other Google Sitelink Features:

Algorithm improvement (combined sitelink ranking and regular result ranking for higher quality list of links).
Reduced link duplication and more organized results pages.
All results from top ranked site are listed within the first result as sitelinks (other site results appear below).
Number of sitelinks will vary by query (the more specific the query, the more sitelinks displayed because Google is more confident you want results from that particular site).

What does this mean for SEO?

More of an emphasis is placed on the first search result – increasing screen real estate for that result.
It’ll be harder to generate SEO traffic for branded keyword searches—even the number two result may be pushed beneath the fold.
We may see an increase in AdWords spending for branded terms.

Can I customize my sitelinks on Google?

Absolutely, and Boomtown can help. Google Webmaster Tools allows us to demote sitelinks from being displayed in search results (say for example, you didn’t like one of the site links Google picked). This isn’t anything new, but with the huge and expanded results, it’s more important to do so!

These changes continue to roll out globally for anyone with a modern browser—just another way Google is making it easier and faster for searchers to reach the information they’re looking for.