What’s the deal with Google Sitelinks?
If you use Google a lot for searching the internet, you may have noticed some changes in recent weeks.
When you search for a brand e.g. “Graham and Green”, you will see that the majority of the first page of Google has changed. This is because Google have recently made some changes to how they display search results for large or popular websites by adding sitelinks.
So what exactly are Google sitelinks and how do they work? In the simplest of terms, Google crawls your website and finds shortcuts to the pages that it thinks users will find the most useful and displays these links under your home page when users search for your brand. This helps users find the content they are looking for much quicker.
As the changes seem to currently only appear for company or brand names, this update means it is more important than ever to rank number one for your brand name.
“I haven’t got sitelinks yet, how do I get them?”
At the moment, Google has said that sitelinks are automated and so webmasters will need to build well-structured sites and be patient if their website doesn’t have sitelinks yet – Google has indicated that they may incorporate webmaster input in the future.
There are two bits of good news for websites that are lucky enough to have sitelinks listed under their names in Google already.
1. You can ‘demote’ any sitelink that you are unhappy with. Simply go to your webmaster tools homepage and under ‘Site Configuration’, click ‘Sitelinks’. Enter the URL you don’t want to appear in the search box and go from there. However, changes may take a little time to take effect.
2. It will be harder for competitors to use Google to muscle in on your brand name in search. Competitors can bid on your brand name in Adwords but if your homepage and 12 site links are appearing, it is less likely that competitors will be able to divert visitors away from your website.
In the mean time, you can make sure that your website is easy for Google spiders to crawl with clean code, clean URLs and internal links within your website that are
To discuss your website and how an SEO strategy implemented by Real Web SEO can help improve your online sales, contact us now on 0845 544 1765
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