How to get Google Sitelinks for your website

April 8, 2008

Finally Googlelady.com have SiteLinks with the keyword “googlelady”, Yes, I wished that there are many other keywords better than Googlelady but you can believe that from that keyword I receive an avarage of 10 unique visitors (it’s wierd who will search for Googlelady and why). Anyways, I have seen this phenomenon happening around Google and it seems that many webmasters are getting those SiteLinks, but how you can get your site a SiteLink? This article is from Free Seo News and let’s analyse it depends on Googlelady.com site experience:

Many webmasters wonder how they can make Google display additional Sitelinks for their websites. What exactly are Sitelinks, how can you get them and are they worth the effort?

What are Google Sitelinks?

Google Sitelinks are a collection of links that appears below the result of a website. These additional links link to main pages of the website. They are randomly and automatically chosen by Google’s algorithm.

As an example, here are the sitelinks that you get for HP.com when you search for “HP”:

Sitelinks only appear for general search terms. You’ll get Sitelinks if you search for “HP” but you won’t get Sitelinks if you search for a term like “HP printer supplies”. Sitelinks show up most often for searches on brand names.

sitelinks for googlelady

Sitelinks are very good for extra traffic in your website, but the problem comes like Googlelady that most of the sitelinks depends on the word in the domain name. But this still not proved that all depends on the domain but for sure is a major factor to get sitelinks on the keyword of your domain.

Which links does Google use for the Sitelinks?

Google seems to use the first level links on a website for the Sitelinks. That means that all links that are not present on the homepage of your site won’t be used as Sitelinks.

The links should be descriptive text links or image links with a descriptive IMG ALT attribute. JavaScript or Flash links are not considered for Sitelinks. Google uses 2 to 8 links for the Sitelinks of a website. Unfortunately, it’s unclear how Google assigns the number of links to each website.

The text that is used for the Sitelinks can be the text that are used for the link (anchor text) on the homepage or the title of the linked page. It seems that Google prefers links that appear at the top of a web page.

I can’t agree with what have been said here, because if you check the “Sitelink” of Googlelady.com you can see the 49 adwords tips and Make Money Online which both of them are Posts and are not in the main page. But what I see about it is that many of my posts are linked to those both articles. So it seems that if you want to get a sitelink it should be linked from many of your posts (if we are talking about blogs) and should be get a lot of backlinks from other sites. At the moment Googlelady have 5 sitelinks.

How can you get Sitelinks for your website?

Unfortunately, there is nothing certain about Google’s Sitelinks. The following factors seem to influence whether Google displays Sitelinks or not:

1. Your website must have a stable #1 ranking for the searched keyword. Other websites don’t seem to get Sitelinks. Googlelady Note: Googlelady have not been at the #1 ranking but it started to rank #1 since 6 to 7 months ago.
2. Your website must be at least 2 years old. It seems that younger websites don’t get Sitelinks. Googlelady Note: It seems that the “old” of the site have nothing to do with sitelinks, Googlelady have been since 2005 and I got a sitelink few weeks ago. But in case that Google is doing this as a new update then the age of the site can be a factor.
3. The number of searches and the number of clicks that your website gets for a certain keyword seem to be considered. Keywords that aren’t searched often enough don’t get Sitelinks. It also seems that your website has to get many clicks for the searched keyword. Googlelady Note: If this is the situation I think I should be get sitelinks from other posts and categories like Google Adwords category but the categories which is listed as sitelink have a little or no traffic at all sometimes. I still believe that in the case of a blog the category or the posts should be linked from many of your posts (Onsite Link).
4. The number of links that point to your website with the searched keyword as the anchor text seem to influence the creation of Sitelinks. Sitelinks only seem to appear for the main keywords of a website, not for all keywords for which a website is listed. Googlelady Note: Most of my backlinks comes from the anchor text “Googlelady” or “Make Money Online” when webmasters link to my case study, also most of the time googlelady.com is linked as an active link without an anchor text.

If your website meets these criteria Google might assign Sitelinks to your website for your most important keywords. Sitelinks can be a nice addition for searches for general keywords but they usually won’t appear for searches that consist of two to four words. These words are the most important keywords for website promotion and search engine optimization.

I will add another 2 criterias:

You should have a well website structure so the bots can know what is your blog theme.
If you want to make a post as a sitelink you have to make a lot of posts linked to that post (OnSite Linking).