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.
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.
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Nice write up Mani
Technobuzz.net’s last blog post..Create and Share ringtones free with PhoneZoo
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[...] Mani Karthik has an interesting post on how to make your pages appear beneath snippets in Google SERPs. [...]
Informative post dude
subhash’s last blog post..How to run third party applications on your iphone and get full access to your iphone disk?
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Nice post. I’m search how to add sitelinks to Google SERPs & now I’m sure I should stop finding.
Thanks
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[...] 9.SitelinksThe site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out. [...]
Nice info Mani
An interesting read indeed
BTW I found this link for a Google search for
Taking control of Google serps
Where I am listed third and your are fifth for that search term
Well we we’re when I looked prior to posting this.
Keep up the good work
KDM
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Glad that you’re here KDM. Hope you’ll find some good read here. Yea, this is one long tail I’m ranking on the first page.
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Thanks Mani
We both seem to have moved up for that search term mentioned interestingly.
It will be interesting to see what other search terms anyone notices this nice read about those little snippets achieves equally high ranking serps for?
If its OK with Mani if you found this page doing a Google search perhaps you could mention the search term you used when you comment - I would find this as interesting as the original info Mani gave.
Would that be OK with you Mani?
Obviously keeping on topic to.
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KD Mains,
You are right. I was No.5 earlier for “Taking control of Google serps” now I’m No.1 over here(IND) and you are No.2, we’ve improved definitely.
Other search terms I found interesting -
1 - Google serps sitelinks (No.1)
2 - Control google sitelinks (No.2)
3 - google serps links (No.10)
Mani Karthik’s last blog post..Top traffic generating keywords
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I dropped down a bit since I commented on that Mani but you are still #1 - Interesting eh - I am going to check out those other se terms youmentioned now.
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[...] reading on Sitelinks at DailySEOblog Article 1,Article 2,Article 3 Copyright © 2008 DailySEOblog.com. This Feed is for personal [...]
[...] reading on Sitelinks at DailySEOblog Article 1,Article 2,Article 3 Read More [...]
Hey Mani
I would like to conduct an interview with you primarily on TVWorlds.com but also will do you an extra’s thing for your site in exchange if you would be interested?
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Mani,
Thanks for the post
I think some day Google will start charging to display sitelinks.
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Mani,
Interesting post - always wanted to know more about site links. Thank for shedding light on it!
Does having folders on a website make it more likely to have site links?
BTW, you are still No.1 for “taking control of Google serp’s”…..
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Let me tell what I know. Sitelinks or breakouts are usually displayed when site itself is popular and it has other popular pages/section/subdomains under it.
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Really great info Mani
Hatz off to ur knowledge base and skills
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Mani Karthik Replied:
Glad you liked it Atul.
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