site links - notes&reasons

mhmdkhamis · PR4 Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 436 Location: egypt

I have been studying the sitelink issue to figure out when google sitelink bot decides to show these extra links for a site. I have come out with the following notes and I thought I should share them with you.

The main factor is how many searches are done for your site name compared to the total searches. There are many terms which lead visitors to your site. If "your site name" lies in the top 5 terms that lead them to your site, you are on your way to have sitelinks.

I have a site that people reach by searching for its name in google.(not me) Smile

This name is the second most used term for it. Although there are only 150 visits for this term, the site has sitelinks. I have seen this with many other sites as well.

This, in fact, makes sense. If a site is popular (many searches), then if google is sure that a visitor is searching for it now, it will be useful to show the inner links as well. How will google know if people are really searching for it? When they search for its name.

The second factor, which is not less important, is how stable your link structure is. You have many sections and links on your site. If you keep them as they are for a while (several weeks), then you are on your way as well. From my experience, it took google a month to decide that for my site.

There is a point at which google starts watching to consider adding sitelinks to your site. I think this point is the number of searches for your site. We can not expect it to show sitelinks for a site that is searched for for 10 or 20 times a day.

On the other hand, they are not related to how many incoming links you have. I have seen sitelinks for sites with less than 500 regular backlinks and I have seen it for a site with 27,000 regular backlinks.

Also, they are not related to any file (sitemap, robots, etc.) which you many create and place in your root waiting for this. It comes by itself.

and sure domain age is effect to

-this article
Movable Wink

dcz · Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 1:23 pm Post subject: Re: site links - notes&reasons

Your observation about the relationship between the number of time your site name is searched for, the other possible searches and the site links is interesting.

I still doubt these would not be in the end manually moderated by Google, but the criteria you propose here does make sens and could be a part of what's behind these.

What I think though, is that sub domains are really less likely to show up in these than folders or just root urls like on the example you posted.

We'll see what happens with phpBB SEO, being according to your criteria, likely to end up with site links.

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mhmdkhamis · PR4 Joined: 26 Nov 2006 Posts: 436 Location: egypt