Sitelinks are links which are displayed below the main result for brand name searches. They allow users to go straight to a deeper page within the site.

For last few years Google’s been experimenting with different layouts of sitelinks. They started off with a list of links as bullet points. Then they kept moving them around until they decided to show all sitelinks as separate results. This meant that for search query like ‘sky’ the whole of page one in Google was dominated by the sky.com domain. After only few months Google scrapped the idea without giving specific explanation. To be fair though, I’m not surprised they did as this meant they almost suffocated the affiliate sector, price comparison websites and at the end haven’t really improved their main goal – relevancy. They then returned to the old way of laying out sitelinks.

After several attempts at improving the sitelinks, it looks like Google has finally cracked it this time (official blog post). Strong brands now get extra four to twelve sitelinks, each with a prominent title, URL and mini description, see below:

Image of East Midlands Trains search results.

So what does that mean for SEO, PPC and Search in general?

New sitelinks and CTR

Well, to start with, your CTR for brand searches may go up. You’ll suddenly dominate page 1 for your best traffic driving search terms.

All good times then? No, not necessarily, and definitely not if your website is on the exact match domain and uses generic keywords as a domain name, e.g. http://www.cheapflights.co.uk/ (notice no sitelinks when you search for cheap flights). The good thing is that you’re not really losing anything in this scenario, but whilst the majority of your competitors benefit from the sitelinks update, you don’t.

Another crucial activity and one of the first things everyone should do is checking what sort of sitleinks you get. Are they sitelinks to your key landing pages? Do you get any sitelinks which you don’t want people to see (e.g. privacy, terms & conditions)? Are there any sitelinks you want to keep but you don’t like what they say?

To remove the sitelink, log in to the Webmaster Tools account and remove those you don’t want. Easy! Google will most likely replace the removed sitelink with another one – hopefully more meaningful one.

To change what the sitelink title says, you need to first find where Google pulls that text from on your page. In most cases that’s a link anchor text from your navigation, footer or main body. It could also pull it from the page title or headings.

To change what the mini description says you have to change the meta description tag of that page. Remember that Google will only show up to 32 characters with spaces in the sitelink description.

New sitelinks and AdWords

Based on the above it would be perfectly normal to ask: why do I need to bid on my own brand now? After all, your website links dominate the search results page. Whilst it makes perfect sense, you might be seeing conversions going down if you do so. Yes, organic search results will capture the majority of PPC traffic, but since you can do very little in terms of editing sitelinks you can’t treat it as a PPC ad substitute.

Additionally, you can rest assured that Google planned it very carefully since AdWords brings them 97% of their annual profit. One could say that this is also why they disabled the option to browse through all your sitelinks in Webmaster Tools.

Positive or negative change?

So far the update has been received positively. As long as Google differentiates between brand names and generic search terms everyone should be relatively happy with it. Google will start delivering more relevant results without affecting their main revenue tream, users will find what they want quicker and easier, companies will have another tool in their arsenal to battle affiliates, concessions, resellers and price comparison websites.