Google’s New Extended Sitelinks

Coveted by Webmasters the world over, Google’s Sitelinks have recently gotten a lot of attention.  With the new, extended sitelinks, search engine results pages offer almost a full scroll to sitelinks.  This has left SEO-ers and webmasters scrambling to find out how to get sitelinks on their site.

According to Google Webmaster Guidelines, sitelinks are automatically generated based on search user behavior.  Which makes sense since they seem heavily dependent on the tracking info hidden in the links on search results.  Using that data would be the first signal the algorithm must use in determining sitelinks.

After years of careful review (and a lot of guessing), here are three big tips to help your chances of receiving the blessing of Google’s extended sitelinks.

Age Before Beauty

We have seen young websites (2 years or so) receive sitelinks, but we’ve found that to be very rare.  The age of the domain and the website appear to be signals.  Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to make time speed up.  What you can do is make sure your domain name is far away  from expiration and that any old iterations of your corporate domain are [tooltip content=”A 301 Redirect passes pagerank. A 302 is a temporary redirect and therefore passess no pagerank. 301 is a little like a change of address.” url=”” ]301 redirected[/tooltip] to the current domain.

Size DOES Matter

We have never seen a 10-page website receive sitelinks.  If your site is only a few pages (less than 100, in this case), you might be SOL.  Consider a content marketing strategy as part of your organic SEO efforts to increase the number of pages on your site.  WARNING: Stay far away from duplicate content.  It’s search engine leprosy.

Plan Around the Popular Sections of Your Site

As we mentioned before, it appears that Google’s extended sitelink algorithm is heavily influenced by user behavior (also known as the Click Stream).  Find out which sections of your website are your most popular (easily found in your analytics) and plan around increasing the popularity of those and similar sections of your site (a blog, newsletter, news & announcements, events, team profiles, etc., etc., etc.).

Clear Navigation

Perhaps the only clue Google gives us is we have to have a clear and hierarchical text-based navigation.  If Google can’t understand the hierarchy of your site, they will not award it sitelinks for any keyword or phrase.  Take a long, hard look at your navigation.  Even if you never receive Google sitelinks, your confused visitors will still thank you.

Proof?!

Take a look at the featured image at the top of the post (click on it to open a larger view in a lightbox).  Take a close look at [tooltip content=”Look closely at Dell’s navigation and then back at the attached image.  See the correlation?” url=”http://dell.com” ]Dell.com’s website navigation[/tooltip] and then take another look at the featured image.  Tell me the extended sitelinks Google has returned on the screenshot search results page don’t almost perfectly correlate to the site’s navigation!