What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks?

What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks? - Google Search Console is a free application that allows you to identify, troubleshoot, and resolve any issues that Google may encounter as it crawls and attempts to index your website in search results. If you’re not the most technical person in the world, some of the errors you’re likely to encounter there may leave you scratching your head. We wanted to make it a bit easier, so we put together this handy set of tips about seo, google-search, search-results, sitelinks to guide you along the way. Read the discuss below, we share some tips to fix the issue about What are the most important things I need to do to encourage Google Sitelinks?.Problem :

My website used to have sitelinks and now it doesn't. It's very possible that it's due to changing the website to a sidebar design instead of having an "interstitial" type landing page which limited the number of choices, but I'm not sure.

Here is how sitelinks might look for a site:

What are some things that I can do to improve my chances of getting sitelinks?

Solution :

You will need to have quite a bit of traffic to your site to get those. Keep creating great content. Google will not give those out easy.

Be sure that you have your navigation marked up with semantic HTML and include an id of nav or navigation on your menu. This will help Google know what links are your navigation. (as opposed to a list of links).

Also, once you get them Google will give you an option to control what links you want in your sitelinks via Google Webmaster Tools.

There is no easy way or publicly know algorithm that will give you sitelinks. And I'm sure that algorithm changes all the time.

DO NOTS:

• Don't use JavaScript For links and menus.


• Don't think about it too much and give it time, sitelinks are rare.

Excerpt from Googler Maile Ohye's explanation on Sitelinks in Google Webmaster Help -

Sitelinks are often produced when
there's a high probability that the
site is the top match for the user's
query. In other words, to have
sitelinks ... you'll probably need to
be the definitive first result

Sitelinks are completely automated & based on Google's algorithms. To get Sitelinks for a site it helps to have a well-structured website.

Sitelinks are usually taken from the home page. Make sure Google is able to see those links; if your website used heavy JavaScript to construct the DOM it's possible that Google simply doesn't see any link.

To see if this is the case open your website with a command line (no GUI) web browser, such as links (Linux). Alternatively, try to disable JavaScript in your own browser.

You may also maintain a footer that is rich in (text) links; make sure you use good labels. You can think of the footer as a subset of your complete sitemap. This might suggest Google that those links / contents are quite important since they are repeated across the site (assuming all pages have the same footer).

If the issue about seo, google-search, search-results, sitelinks is resolved, there’s a good chance that your content will get indexed and you’ll start to show up in Google search results. This means a greater chance to drive organic search traffic to your site.