How to make your pages appear beneath snippets in google SERPs

Rajesh asked me this question – How does some sites manage to get their pages listed beneath the snippets in Google search? They appear in groups and all the pages/navigation structure appears there. I can’t get my blogs pages appear near the snippets.

Rajesh is talking about Google Sitelinks (See screenshot).

Sitelinks are the group of links to the pages or navigation links in your blog/site that appear right beneath the snippets, or site description text during a google search.

As you might have noticed already, sitelinks appear only for certain sites and not everybody gets the privilege to show them. It appears for almost all high traffic sites and authority sites.

To answer Rajesh’s question, there is nothing at the moment we can do to make the sitelinks appear for your site.

Meaning, Google says it’s completely automated. That is information like, which sites are eligible to show sitelinks, how many sitelinks are to be shown, which are the pages that should appear at the sitelinks, are decided by the google site crawlers and there is very little a webmaster or SEO can do regarding it. Read Google’s theory here.

Okay so as usual, Google speaks from it’s own perspective with no or less help to webmasters. But from our observations, we can make calculated guesses though, can’t we? Here’s what I found.

• Only websites with huge traffic seem to have been displaying sitelinks.
• The links listed in a sitelink are mostly the most-viewed pages in a site.
• The links are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
• In sites that have sitelinks, the category pages or the navigation structure is universal or repeated many times, this may be a criteria for Google to understand that these links help reduce the user’s navigation time.

As Google says in it’s explanation, their algorithms pick up short-cuts that will help reduce user’s time in finding pages on a site. This could be a pointer to the navigation structure. But you can’t completely rely on this information.

If you take Yahoo! for example, in the sitelinks that were shown to me, I got the following links (see screenshot).
Mail – The best web-based email! My Yahoo! Finance Games Radio Sports and Movies.

So clearly, all the links in the navigation menu are not included in the sitelinks but yes, the one’s that are shown clearly are the ones that either have the maximum page views or are the most popular ones.

So that could be one pointer to us – The pages/links in the navigation menu with the maximum clicks or page views will be picked by Google to include in the site links. But again, this is only an assumption and a calculated guess.

As of now, Google does not give us any information on how to add sitelinks to our sites, to help searchers find more information from your sites. I’m unaware if this is a “premium feature” available to some sites, but Google does take feedback from you on this. That is if you have sitelinks appearing for your website, and it is wrong the way it is shown right now, you can let google know of this and get it corrected. See how to do it here.