How to make your pages appear beneath snippets in google SERPs
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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.
- Only websites with huge traffic seem to have been displaying sitelinks.
- The links listed in a sitelink are mostly the most-viewed pages in a site.
- The links are mostly a copy of the links in the site’s navigation structure.
- In sites that have sitelinks, the category pages or the navigation structure is universal or repeated many times, this may be a criteria for Google to understand that these links help reduce the user’s navigation time.
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.
Nice write up Mani
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Informative post dude
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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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
Mani,
Thanks for the post
I think some day Google will start charging to display sitelinks.
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”…..
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.
Really great info Mani
Hatz off to ur knowledge base and skills
Glad you liked it Atul.
I have tried many ways to try get sitelinks, and they just never work, well all but one.
Have a 5 year old domain that some how as picked up these sitelinks in google, and the funny thing is i have not done anything to it for around 3 or more years.
Goes to show, one can try to hard.
Agreed! The site links also seem to appear for some not-so huge traffic sites. But yes, these are sites that receive quality traffic.
very nice blog……. I really appreciate it…..
My calculation says- google have fixed some number for page views e.g. 50 thousand. If any website will cross it, it will get sitelinks on google.
Thanks So much for your info,useful for newbie like me,i will try it
another good tips to optimize Google serps, thx Mani
I think the sites that are the ultimate authority on the search term, get the links displayed, not sure how much traffic they need to have, but some sites I know only get around 50 uniques a day have a PR of 2, and also have the sitelinks displayed when you search for their Domain name.
In order to help google to generate sitelinks make sure your navigation should be inform and well maintained throughout the website. Google picks up the best anchor text from the navigation and shows that in the sitelinks. Another aspect is quality links to those pages which are targetted in the navigation.
site link!! THANKS FOR THE USEFUL INFO
I am happy that my blog got sitelinks day before yesterday
Maybe you should change the title from ‘how to make your pages appear beneath snippets in google serps’ to, I really have no idea but will repeat the same content for my own SEOing..
very nice……………………..
I am happy with this post really useful tips and great posting.
Great post.