Sitelinks – Google was busy with new announcements yesterday.

In addition to its launch of Google Related, the search engine giant announced on its Webmaster Central Blog that new sitelinks are now available on Google’s search results page. Let’s break it down to the most important things marketers should know about this new feature.

What Are Google Sitelinks?

Sitelinks are the short links that often appear beneath a website’s first listing on a search results page. They vary depending on what you searched for and what Google thinks is most relevant to you and your search term, and they enable searchers to click directly to a deeper page on the website listed in the results (other than the base page). Generally, sitelinks only appear on brand-related terms like a company’s name, but they can sometimes appear for other keywords or phrases when relevant.

It’s important to emphasize that you can’t influence sitelinks, make certain ones appear, or force them to appear if you don’t have any showing up for your website.

PLEASE NOTE:  Google chooses them entirely on its own and only when it wants to.

You can, however, request that Google not show specific deeper pages on your website in your sitelinks via the Google Webmaster Tools for your website.

That said, beginning yesterday, Google is rolling out its new and improved full sitelinks for these listings.

Take a look at the new “Herb Chambers” search result:

Herb Chambers Google SiteLinks

“It turns out that sitelinks are quite useful because they can help predict which sections of the site you want to visit,” Daniel Rocha, a software engineer on the Google Sitelinks team, wrote in a blog post. “Even if you didn’t specify your task in the query, sitelinks help you quickly navigate to the most relevant part of the site, which is particularly handy for large and complex websites. Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.”  Google also said that it was tweaking its search algorithm to accommodate the changes. “In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links,” Rocha said. “This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page. Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them.”

Google’s new changes make improvements to sitelinks’ visibility (now with full-sized text and a highlighted URL); flexibility (now more optimized depending on the search terms); clarity (if a domain is the top result, results from the same domain won’t appear again on the same results page); and quality (a better ranking algorithm on Google’s backend).

In summary, Google is now displaying part of the meta description and the address of each page returned in the sitelinks. The links generally appear to be the same ones as before, although Google says they might vary depend on search terms used, and they now include more detail. It’s also important to note that Google clearly states in its announcement that this will not impact the sitelinks being used in PPC AdWords ads or other placements. Only organic search results are using these new and enhanced sitelinks.

Read more – Original HubSpot Article: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/22866/Google-Announces-Improvements-to-Sitelinks-in-Search-Results.aspx#ixzz1VJDMs6Tb