How do you get those extra links in Google?

February 3, 2009 · Filed Under SEO Advice, SEO Questions, SEO Resources, SEO Tips · Comments Off 

A question was submitted to me just today about those extra links that tend to show up in a Google Search Results page.

The Question:
Hello,
I have a burning question and I can’t find an answer in SEO course available.
If you do this search: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=kurir&btnG=Search

You’ll notice the first result has 8 other links besides the main one (Crna hronika, sport etc.). That must increase the CTR a lot.

The question is: what makes Google do that for one site and not for another one?
What should you do with your site to get such extra links in the results?

Best Regards,
Eko

Here’s an example of what they look like:

These are called “Site Links” and the bottom line is that Google does not tell you exactly how to get these sitelinks for your own site.

However, each website that contains these sitelinks has a few common denominators:

  • They’re typically an authority site.
  • They have an easy-to-navigate hierarchical structure.  In the case above, there is a section for “Sports”, a section for “Stars” and a section for “Politics” as Eko pointed out.
  • They have lots of incoming one-way links from a variety of sources.
  • The sites are easy to navigate.
  • The age of the site tends to be a defining factor.

If we pick apart the site above, there’s a few things to note about it:

  • The site has a PageRank of 6.
  • It has over over 100,000 links pointing to the site itself including internal pages.
  • Sites such as these generally have been around for years.
  • The site has lots of useful information that readers enjoy by clicking through to various pages.

You’ll generally find these sitelinks on major news sites like CNN and highly visited sites such as Oprah’s site at Oprah.com.

So while these sitelinks can be a huge boost for your search engine traffic, they aren’t easy to come by.  Google must deem your site “worthy” enough to receive these sitelinks.

If you use Google Webmaster tools, at http://www.Google.com/webmasters/tools/ and you’ve added your site, you’ll be able to navigate to the section where Google tells you whether or not any sitelinks have been identified on your site as candidates for the Google Search Results page.

The bottom line is that there is no hard and fast rule to getting sitelinks placed on your site aside from some of the factors that are believed to be important as mentioned above.

If you’d like more information about sitelinks, visit:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Kristine

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