Extended Sitelinks Here to Stay

Notice anything different about search results today, in particular your sitelinks? Well Google has confirmed that new extended sitelinks are here to stay.

When typing in a brand, your search results will display twelve extended sitelinks with a short description and URL as opposed to the usual eight single line links.

Sitelinks were originally introduced to help make your search queries more detailed, predicting the kinds of things you were searching for. This remains their principle use but interestingly they now offer a lot of wins for brand advertisers and companies who promote best practice SEO.

More Power to the Brands

The most notable gain is the sheer ubiquitous nature of the results. They will bully affiliate sites below the fold in most parts and give users a better idea of what is available on a site. It also gives the brand more authority at the top of a page.

This development gives advertisers more opportunities to optimise their content for further gains. Re-doing meta descriptions and having clean URLs will prove to be very useful in helping click through. Another interesting addition allows for sitelinks to be demoted in Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) whereas before they could only be excluded.

Daniel Rocha, Software Engineer for Google’s Sitelinks Team also suggested developments to algorithms to include sitelinks. He said:

“In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links. This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page.”

Dom Barry, Head of Strategy at hômejames commented:

“It’s clearly a big win for sites that Google considers to be brands as it is likely to mean more brand traffic, which converts well. I’ll be interested to find out more about how much control webmasters have over the links that appear and the text which is displayed.”