What Are Google Sitelinks?

It’s Google’s Matt Cutts with another Webmaster Help video. This one answers a question about Google’s sitelinks.

Sitelinks are the sublinks to the interior pages of a website which are sometimes featured directly below its search listing, as seen in the image below.

These sub page links are most often triggered by a navigational search, which is a search for a brand or URL. They can also appear below the site sitting as the number one result for a keyword search. There will generally be less of these sub links listed for a keyword query.

These sitelinks are created algorithmically, meaning there is no one manually going through the site determining what the best choices for links would be. How does the algorithm decide? What factors are involved in the decision? Shockingly, Matt doesn’t say.

One of Google’s official statements on the subject is the following:

“Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they’ll be useful to the user. If your site’s structure doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user’s query, we won’t show them.”

From that we can surmise that a website needs a decent navigation system and structure that the bots will easily be able to crawl their way through. But that’s just sensible SEO advice and certainly can’t be the deciding factor in which sites get sitelinks generated and which don’t. A strong brand is probably part of the mix. Matt states in this video that they want to “believe it’s useful and have data to support that fact“. Generally Google tends to base a site’s “usefulness” and reputation on the number of quality back links it has, which may be the data in question here.

The only useful information we really know for sure about sitelinks is that they can be removed within Google’s Webmaster Tools. Log in there, and go to Site Configuration/Sitelinks. No, you can’t assign replacement links for those you remove, or edit the existing sitelinks in any way.

If you’re trying to get sitelinks for your site, try working on increasing your quality back links, strengthening your brand, and making sure your site structure and navigation is sound. Sitelinks or not, efforts in those areas can only do good things for your web site.