Google sitelinks - Shouldn’t webmaster’s decide it ?

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May

Filed Under (Search Engine Optimization) by Mani Karthik on 10-05-2008

Before reading this article, you might have to check this article here by Rand, where he is suggesting 10 questions to the search engines.

I had replied to it over here with two more questions from my side to Google and here is Matt’s reply to my questions.

Well, basically I was trying to ask Google about sitelinks. I wanted to know from Google as to whether they would give us more control over the sitelinks as many of the links appearing there are not relevant.

We had a discussion on DailySEOblog over sitelinks over here once. Where we had discussed on how to control sitelinks using Google webmasters tool.

Okay now to the problem.

In the SEO Moz thread, I asked Google if they would give us more control over sitelinks. What I intended was that, we needed authority on the Google webmasters tool, which enables us to decide what links appear and doesn’t appear. The “and” is important here.

As of now, you can use Google webmasters to “block” any link that has already appeared on the sitelinks. But the main problem is that the sitelinks appear “automatically”. If there is a wrong link (Ex: - Title of your about page and link to an article page), then there’s nothing much you can do about it other than to block it and wait for another replacement.

For example, in this image -

All the links that appear are automatically detected by Google’s robots. ( In this article about sitelinks, we discussed on how can we control the sitelinks by understanding how google detects the sitelinks. )

Many of the links in the sitelinks are either high traffic ones, or more linked ones. Even though we are not sure on what exactly are the metrics that go into decide a sitelink, there is a pattern you can see there.

I want to make this clear to Matt and Google.

Yes, it’s cool when the bots automatically detects the links and puts it up on the sitelinks. But the problem is when irrelevant links appear on the sitelinks.

If it is a blog, bots may select a high traffic article (that’s what I see in my case), but that may not be something I want to feature on the sitelinks, instead an about me page may be. But as of now, I don’t have the privilege to decide a page appear on the sitelinks. In effect, you don’t have the control over sitelinks.

As of now, random sitelinks appear, and if you find something irrelevant, you block it and may be…may be…a relevant link replaces, but sometimes it could also be an irrelevant link.

I think Google’s theory/algorithm of picking up sitelinks based on popularity/linking pattern/traffic may work best for static websites but for blogs and websites with new content thrown up every second, I don’t think it is relevant.

Sitelinks are good as it is, but certainly not in the best shape, as it should be.

Here’s my request to Google,

Guys, Webmasters spend a lot of time and effort tweaking every minute detail on their websites to make sure that they deliver the best user friendly and informative website. If you think meta descriptions and title tags should be controlled by webmasters, I see every reason to argue that sitelinks too should be made available for editing by the webmasters. And, that’s total control. Yes, you can always decide as to which site should have it and not.

Comments

sandeep on 11 May, 2008 at 4:51 am #

bingo … mani! lets start a campagin

Atul on 12 May, 2008 at 4:37 am #

Very thought provoking article Mani. I fully agree that we should be able to decide as to what links should apperar. And hope that Google will eventually listen to webmasters. My feeling is they will. Here’s why -

First they introduces rel attribute for bloggers, then gave webmasters the option to block sitelinks. That means they do care !

Atul on 12 May, 2008 at 5:05 am #

Just an afterthought Mani. I was reading the previous post about sitelinks. You mentioned that one of the criteria for sitelinks to appear is search friendliness. The exact quote was “Another criteria believed to be taken into consideration for a page to be included in the sitelinks is the measure of it’s search engine friendliness”. Does search engine friendly is not all about navigation, design and content ? The second line “It can be measured as the number of times the particular article was “searched and clicked on” through the search engines” is more clear.

Niyaz PK on 12 May, 2008 at 7:13 am #

From another perspective, I think that Google is trying to show the visitors the popluar pages in the website.
In a sense this is better for visitors because they get to know about the popluar pages in the website.
So in essense what google does is better for the visitors rather than webmasters who want to showcase their website in Google like they showcase it in some directory with all the details THEY decide to show.

Mani Karthik on 12 May, 2008 at 7:17 am #

That is true Niyaz, Google seem to be picking up the most traffic gnerating pages. The problem occurs when the pages are wrong and the links are wrong. I’ve had experience where one of my sitelinks had the title of a page but was linking to another article. Clearly, the google bot needs to make sure that it’s algorithm is error free or else sitelinks will do more harm to the site than good.

Nish on 12 May, 2008 at 10:10 am #

Sitelinks is a service by Google, so I guess they have the right to decide that…

Having said that, I do agree with your point of view but IMO Google will never let webmasters choose that.

Mani Karthik on 13 May, 2008 at 10:20 am #

@Nish, sitelinks is not a service.