Google SiteLinks: How to Get Google Site Links for Your Website

Recently I noticed Bloggers Passion had been awarded Google sitelinks. I was really happy on seeing Google site links for my blog. I was able to know about them from my Google webmasters tool account here. So I think why not I share some tips so that other website owners and bloggers can get sitelinks from Google for their websites and blogs.

Today, we will be discussing the following things:

• What are Google Sitelinks
• How Google Sitelinks are Actually Generated
• Benefits of Having Sitelinks
• How to gain sitelinks for your website
• And how to remove a particular link from your sitelinks section

What Are Google Sitelinks?

Google Sitelinks are automatic links that are generated by Google Algorithm. They used to appear below our website listing in search result pages on Google. Google created them to help searchers better understand a website before visiting it and as a shortcut to important pages on that website. They are randomly chosen by Google Algorithm and we don’t have much control over which pages from our website will be chosen as sitelinks by Google. But we can surely block pages of our choice being used as Site Links through oir Google Webmaster Tools account.

Here is an interesting video from Matt Cutts where he is talking about Google sitelinks and how they are actually created:

Google Changing Sitelinks Algorithm

Previously Google used to show maximum 6 sitelinks for a website in its index. But in August 2011, they have increased maximum sitelinks for a website to 12. But while publishing this post, I noticed sitelinks are again reduced to 6. I checked sitelinks for lots of popular websites and blogs on Google, maximum site links I was able to see were 6 only. They look to be  much more detailed now compared to what we previously used to see them.

Google SiteLinks for Bloggers Passion

For Bloggers Passion, I’m currently seeing 6 sitelinks. You can check them by entering ‘Bloggers Passion’ as search term in Google. Here is screenshot showing detailed sitelinks for Bloggers Passion blog in Google search result pages:

Here is the list of 6 pages from my blog which are included in Google Site Links list:

Advertise Here on Bloggers Passion
Get in Touch
About Bloggers Passion
Website Traffic Statistics Report July 2011
Website Traffic Report August 2011
Making Money with Unique Content

So are you able to see Google Sitelinks for your website and blog and how many, please share in the comments section below. And in case Google is not showing sitelinks for your domain, follow the tips mentioned above so that you will start enjoying Google sitelinks for your website in near future.

Benefits of Having Google SiteLinks

The first benefit I see having sitelinks is more traffic to our website from Google for brand names as our website will get more exposure due to the availability of Site Links and better Click Through Rate (CTR).

Second benefit I see having Sitelinks means higher authority for your website on Google. Google seems to be assigning Sitelinks to those websites only that are very popular in their niche, have strong backlinks, well structured navigational links etc. So getting siteinks for my blog gives me nice feeling of being owner of a top authority blog in Google.

Getting Google Site Links for Your Website

First of all let me make it clear, Google has not shared anything that can tell how a website become eligible for sitelinks. We try to judge how a website gets sitelinks depending upon how our previous website gets them and how other website owners are getting them. So there is no shortcut or button that we need to click to get sitelinks. But still there are some factors you should work on to get SiteLinks for your website from Google.

1. It’s the number of links that are pointing to our website home page that matters the most. If our domain name is just a collection of generic terms, our website chances of getting sitelinks for those terms are quite low. We should look at getting links to our website for its brand name. Like for my blog home page, I can think of getting links for terms like Bloggers Passion, BloggersPassion, BloggersPassion.com, my own name and certain combinations involving brand and my name. So we should look at ways to get more links to my blog home page using these anchors. We used to get sitelinks for very few key terms only and not for every search term where our website is ranking.
2. Number of cached pages also matters for the terms you want to get sitelinks for your website. These cached pages are not the cached pages from your website, but pages from other websites that are showing up in Google search results.
3. Domain age also matters a lot in this regard. I did not noticed websites with few months age getting sitelinks from Google. Bloggers Passion was one year plus when I first noticed sitelinks for it. So websites with good age are stronger candidate for achieving these kind of special links from Google.
4. Your website need to be ranked first position for the search term you want to get sitelinks for. And your website ranking need to be very stable for that search term.
5. High CTR from search engine results pages and high amount of traffic from search engines make your chances of getting sitelinks stronger.
6. We need to create well-structured navigational HTML links. We can use CSS to give stylish look to our navigational links.
7. We need to add correct titles and meta tags for our website home and navigational links to get better click through rate from search engines. Our meta data needs to be corrected and absence of that would result in lower CTR from search engines and chances of your website getting sitelinks become lower.

How to Remove or Demote a Sitelink for your Website

As stated previously, we don’t have much control over how Google counts sitelinks for our website. There is no one in Google team who manually decides sitelinks for a domain. There are certain algorithms that do this job automatically. With sitelinks or sometimes called as quick links, Google aims at showing the most important pages from a domain in Google search. However, sometime Google shows links from your domain that you don’t want to show up and you want to replace them with other links from your domain.

There is no way you can ask Google to add a particular link from your domain as sitelink, but you can surely ask Google to remove a particular link from your sitelinks section as follows:

• Login into your Google Webmaster Tools account and click Sitelinks under Configuration
• Enter the URL of the link you want to remove from Google sitelinks section under Demote This Sitelink URL and click red color Demote button

Google will soon stop showing that link in sitelinks section for your domain and will add another alternate to it. If you are fine with the newly added link, that is fine. If you want to change that as well, you have to repeat the above process again.

Hope those tips will help you get sitelinks for your websites from Google. Do you have any tip that can help us get these hard to get special links for our website from Google quickly, please share in the comments section below.

Tagged as: get, google sitelinks, how, sitelinks, to

Article by Anil Agarwal

Anil has written 340 articles .

If You Like this Post, Subscribe to Our Free Newsletter

You can follow BloggersPassion on Twitter and Facebook here.