For the last several years, we’ve had various implementations of Google’s “sitelinks” feature, the list of pages on a domain that usually appear when a branded or navigational query are performed in the engines. The latest updates to this visual display have brought a total of up to 8 internal links, plus a “more results from domain.com >>” link. With the additional ability of another extra page to take the ranking spot below the sitelinks, this means veritable domination of these queries by the site or brand.
For example, check out a search for SEOmoz at Google:
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Obviously, this is an enviable position to be in if you’re the brand being searched. However, sitelinks aren’t universal, nor are they applied in a perfectly rational fashion. There are so many outliers and oddities that pegging down the specific reason for their existence (or lack thereof) is a challenge. Let’s walk through a few examples to illustrate the issue.
First off, we’ll start with a few basic ones, where we might not predict sitelinks would exist, but where they at least make good sense.
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Aaron Wall’s SEOBook sitelinks for the query “seobook” are a given, but the fact that he also owns the results for the broader and more general query “seo book” (with the space) is an added benefit. It certainly makes you think about creating a business, brand and domain name for highly valuable two or three word combination queries.
Next up is a search for “movie database,” which, while not a remarkably popular search phrase is also more general than the result we’re delivered.
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Obviously, IMDB owning the sitelinks on this query is no huge surprise, but it goes to show how the title of your brand can pull in more general queries in a similar fashion to the SEO Book example.
Now, I’ve got two examples that make a little less sense than the previous ones.
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Brad Fallon has obviously done a fantastic job branding himself as an “SEO Expert” throughout his online links and mentions. This perfectly illustrates how even if your brand and domain have a separate name, you can still claim sitelinks on related terms if the co-citation is common enough (at least, that’s my interpretation). Similarly, a query for “The Times” returns TheTimesOnline.co.uk and shows how Google will consider stopwords like “the” when it’s relevant to the query. It also speaks to the power of that brand, since so many newspapers have attempted to position themselves as “The Times” over the last century and a half.
And now for something completely different…
Impressive, no? CNN has become “news” – the keyword and the brand are indistinguishable to Google. Honestly, I believe that this should be one of those “ultimate goals” for every advanced SEO – to take your site to such a level that when your broadest, most popular keyword is queries, your domain is there with sitelinks. This shows domination and ownership to a level that’s nearly unbeatable.
How about this?
You don’t have to be a big brand to achieve the feat. The keyword search for “Maui Honeymoon Packages” is incredibly broad and has absolutely no brand intent behind it, yet there’s unforgettablehoneymoons.com, dominating the search query with sitelinks in tow (full disclosure, a competitor, TheBigDay.com, is an SEOmoz client).
Lastly, I thought I’d mention some outliers that might really warp expectations:
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GE and eBay are two of the planet’s largest brands, yet neither has achieved “sitelinks” status. If you’re thinking it might be because they have the stock quote attachment, think again – Microsoft, Yahoo!, News Corp, Honda and thousands more all have both. Why is Google excluding these? Honestly, I don’t have a good answer. If I were to guess, I’d say it may have something to do with how these sites use subdomains rather than important internal pages, or that, possibly, they’ve used the Webmaster Central console to block Google from showing any of their important internal pages as sitelinks, but those are both long shots.
Wrapping up, it’s clear that sitelinks are a huge part of dominating branded queries, and a terrific tool for SEOs who know how to wield them. Once again, I’ll take a “best guess” and attempt to list some of the factors that might influence your ability to gain sitelinks, but this is not official and no amount of testing can authoritatively predict why they show:
Potential Factors that Create Sitelinks:
- Domain Authority & Trust (based primarily on links, possibly with some aging factors as well)
- Branded Search Query Volume
- Existence of Multiple High PageRank, Highly Searched-for Internal Pages
- Significant Domain Traffic (as measured through toolbar users or other data)
- Popularity of Brand/Domain Mentions on Pages Across the WWW
- Link Growth Trends (if the site receives a regular influx of new links vs. a very spiky, inconsistent link growth pattern)
BTW – Tonight, it was my intention to write another section for the Beginner’s Guide, but I accidentally forgot to save the post after writing about 1/2 of it (40 minutes of effort), and was too frustrated to re-start the process. Let this be a friendly reminder to always save your posts!
p.s. I should have also noted that Graywolf did a great post about sitelinks recently.
