What influences Google's Sitelinks in SEO

[DJ]

Saw this explanation today which explained how sitelinks work in SEO. If you arent clear... these are the links that appear below the description sometimes when you are searching for something. They usually show 6-8 links that allow you to go to different parts of the website:

“Sitelinks are displayed when a site has ranked consistently number one for a given search term and the site structure is clear enough to Google that it's able to guess which pages are the most important or, more accurately, which pages are likely to be the most important to visitors. It judges this based in part on which pages have the most predominant links as well as site structure and where the pages are located in relation to other parts of the site. Common sitelinks tend to be for pages such as About Us, Contact Us, FAQ, Forums and so on, which is what we're seeing here.

In this case, to influence the inclusion of the requested pages in sitelinks, we would have to change the main navigation at the top of the page to feature links to those pages. This would obviously be a major change that SWLC ought to consider before authorizing us to move forward, and Google would still tend to favour the pages mentioned above for use as the sitelinks, so attempts to manipulate them in this way may not be successful.

However, Google Webmaster Tools does allow you to "demote" specific pages from sitelinks which influences Google to automatically select other important pages instead of the ones currently in use and this may cause one of the pages requested to be used instead. These "demotion" requests need to be renewed every 90 days.”

[Chris Ward]

An extremely informative overview!