Thursday, October 18, 2007 at 11:48 AM
Sitelinks are extra links that appear below some search results in Google. They serve as shortcuts to help users quickly navigate to the important pages on your site.
Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don't want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don't typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don't want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won't appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.
To view and manage your sitelinks
Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned for more updates!
27 comments:
This is great, its nice to see such a helpful feature. I would also be really interested in tips to get Google to generate site links for my website http://www.plumbersurplus.com/. We have pretty friendly URLS and pages we think would make great site links but Google has not generated them in the search results.
I agree. I'd really like some guidance on when Google generates site links and if I can do anything to encourage it.
You've probably noticed that most search results don't show sitelinks; the ones that do are generally for large and/or popular sites. Right now the best advice I can give is to work on increasing the visibility and popularity of your website (which I'm sure you're already doing!).
We also have some information in our Help Center on how and when sitelinks are generated.
This will really help a lot. I have had trouble with some of my larger clients having some links show up they don't want, and have asked me how to get more relevant links to promotions, or featured products (Like at&t wireless and the iPhone)
Well it would be very useful that we can suggest some links on which Google should pay attention while he choosing Sitelinks for our websites.
This is an interesting new feature! Always curious to try out something new I've blocked three of our site links. Two which I'm not too fussed about showing (also reason given) and a third because the title should read differently. Now it's somewhat a mystery to me how blocking it would help, but it seems to be indicated from the drop down list in that area. How will this work exactly; when blocked I can then ask it to be unblocked and it should come back with the correct title?
I'm also keeping track of how long it takes for the update to filter through for some others that are interested in this.
I just found out about the Sitelinks feature, and yes of course, you can't find any info on how to actually generate them, on Google help pages.
Our website, http://www.flags.ro/ has the needed structure, but yet again most sitea do, ar least as far as I've read about this, but I believe you also need VERY high (and quality) traffic and reputed sites to link to yours.
We'll live and see.
But the idea is great nonetheless.
When I block a sitelink, it will be substituted with another?
Hmm. The numbers in the "external links" column of the "pages with external links" page are wacky.
One page has 5 http: links and the table shows 47.
Most sites managed by people that read this blog aren't going to qualify as "large" or have a top ranking on most general searches. However, in some instances people will run a search that brings you to the top (i.e. searching for your specific software product for example), and in that case, it would be nice to have control over sitelinks - which ones appear and how they are displayed. My suggestion would be to use the Sitemap.xml file to indicate which URLs should be listed as sitelinks. That gives the web builders a nice way to control which ones appear and perhaps a short description for each. If google continues to do this automagically, we are left in the dark about how to make them show up once our site gets old enough or used enough - not cool. Guidance and direction, please.
I haven't notice that since I read your post. Thanks.
www.hongkongsevenstickets.com
is my website .. but it has not yet been indexed .. I have added it in the google index couple of weeks.. ago .. Let alone the Site Links..
All fine if you have the number one ranking. If you're #2 and your competition just got 8 new links, you're hosed. Is it really in the intrest of Google users to direct even more traffic to the top spot?
In my Webmaster Tools I have sitelinks on my X-Power.be settings, but they are not displayed in Google search results. Any idea why?
Same here, the sitelinks show up on my webmasters tools page. But not in the google search results.
Why?
I blocked a sitelink weeks ago using the webmaster tools, but it's still showing up on the search. How do I get rid of it?
I have three Page in site link in webmaster tools but it is not shown in google results, why?
I want also know about the query to see sitelinks, on which query google sitelink shown, my site www.posintechnologies.com has three pages in sitelinks.
when it is show in google sitelinks
pls give me answer if anybody have right answer.
thanks
iliyas, I think you need at least 4 sitelinks before they are shown in the search results.
I think this may be a great feature but we need to be able to provide more feedback than just blocking certain pages. The link text on our sitelinks is incorrect and misleading. Also, some of the URLs are urls with campaign tracking parameters so are duplicate content and if we leave those links in the sitelinks we will end up over counting the campaign metrics. It would be great if I could communicate this via webmaster tools but the comments within sitlinks don't seem to carry much weight when it comes to implementation. We may have to turn off sitelinks altogether as the experience now is not intuitive or representative of what our customers are looking for.
Similar issue here. I have 6 sitelinks shown in Webmaster Tools, but none when I search for my brand name -- and yes, my site is the #1 result.
Our website is in the #1 position but we dont want sitelinks and there is no option to block sitelinks in the webmaster tools dashboard. Google says Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site. Please help
Hi,
In webmaster tools dashboard I found 3 sitelinks for our website.
When I checked the guidelines in http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334 , I found a note
that google only display sitelinks when a site has a minimum of four sitelinks available.
If we have three or fewer unblocked sitelinks, no sitelinks at all will appear in Google search results for your site.
When I done the search on google I found a website with 3 sitelinks only. Why it is not showing our website sitelinks?
Hi internet savvy,
Can you give an example of the query you did that shows 3 sitelinks? Or a link to that search results page?
Hi Susan,
have a look at the following link
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GGLG_en___IN240&q=makana+solutions
Hi internet savvy,
I checked around and it seems the minimum is 3 sitelinks, not 4. We'll update our documentation. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!
As that help article mentions, sitelinks only appear when we determine they'll be relevant to the user's query; so even if sitelinks are available for your site, they may not appear for all queries.
Hi and thanks for the information. My question is, how to unblock the sitelinks on the webmaster tools dashboard.
I had a total of 8 visible links and all of a sudden they are all blocked. I never requested to block the links and I have tryed unblocking them without success.
Your help is greatly appreciated.
Hi everyone,
Since several months have passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Help Group.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
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