Google shows what it calls sitelinks for certain queries, and then only for some sites or domains. They appear below the first result on the results page (usually a domain name that contains most or all the keywords from the query), and represent shortcuts to specific content on that site that Google thinks may help you get to the information you need quicker than by manually navigating the site.

Where is the added value? Well, if you own a nice generic domain name that may collect a fare amount of type in traffic, having additional sitelinks show up on a Google search page can only increase the possibility that a visitor will actually end up on your site. Sitelinks, even though claimed by Google as automatically generated by the search algorithm (or see below), give an image of authority for a domain name. So the value of a generic domain name, with the appropriate content on the site and a nice amount of traffic, is increased even further for having additional exposure on Google, which most probably means more traffic. If you were to sell your domain name (and website), which incidentally has sitelinks showing up in Google, you’d probably get a little extra cash for the added value. Ok, that’s great, but what if sitelinks don’t appear for your site?

Bookworm SEO posted an interesting post about his attempt to do research on Google sitelinks on his blog. In this Part 1 of his research post series, he gives a list of 100 sites that Google sitelinks show up for. Sounds interesting, and I’m looking forward to see if he actually comes up with definitive results. I suppose Google will also be interested in seeing this, although I doubt they’ll acknowledge his results should they prove to be valid.

In the meantime, this is what Google says about sitelinks in Webmaster Guidelines:

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

You can aslo see this on Google Webmaster Guidelines.

For now, webmasters can tell Google not to show sitelinks for their site through the Webmaster Tools dashboard, and that sums up all the control webmasters have over sitelinks.

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It seems Facebook is continuing to open its content for the general public. After making user profiles visible to the general public (and search engines), Facebook applications will soon be available also, or rather the about pages for applications. These application about pages will be visible to the search engines which means that users will be able to use search engines to find Facebook apps. Logged out users will be able to read reviews and discussion boards so they can get the full picture of what the application has to offer. Privacy will be respected, so the pages will only show first names for all users, and profile pictures only if the user/developer has allowed this in their private security settings. Users who are not logged in on Facebook will only be able to view content on the about pages.

According to the post on Facebook Developers, the goal of this changes is to make developers’ applications more visible to the public so users can find applications they love using, and gain more potential users who’ll try the apps. Application about pages should appear in the search results of search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Live and ASK in the next couple of days.

I am not sure visitors will search applications “they love using” on search engines. If they love using them, it’s probably because they already use Facebook regularly. Do they really need to look for Facebook applications in places other than Facebook? The new change will be more beneficial in terms of search engine marketing (SEO in particular). The developer company or individual developer will benefit by getting found on the search engine through such an authoritative site or page. A link from the about page to another site (developer’s blog or home site) would be very valuable in that case. With Google (working on its own social network) and other search engines making attempts on getting more exposure on Facebook, the “SE visible” application about pages are about to take on a very significant role. Developing applications and a presence on Facebook is becoming an important Internet marketing ingredient for companies, and as such an important part of SEO in the future.

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I guess this was only a matter of time, but AdSense is finding its way onto Facebook through targeted publishers. Although AdSense has been around on Facebook ever since launch through personal pages, Google is now taking a more direct approach by creating a network targeted specifically at Facebook publishers. According to this post on VentureBeat (there is also an illustration of what this looks like), Google is making efforts in getting third-party Facebook app developers to show AdSense on their application pages. But these AdSense are not just plain old ads; they are targeted specifically for advertisers who want their ads to appear on Facebook. Google was only to quick to exploit this opportunity, especially since the other two main competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo, both have Facebook in their sites, with Microsoft already having signed a deal with Facebook to show its ads across the site.

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Are you using video in your online promotion efforts? Recent trends show that online video can be a very good means of communicating with possible clients. But there is a twist! Online video is also good for a completely different purpose. With the introduction of universal search, which incorporates rich media results together with the usual text (pages), it is now more important than ever for webmasters/marketers to turn their attention towards online video as means to get into the search results.

If you are ranking well for certain keywords that may now trigger the appearance of rich media results in SERPs, you may soon find yourself in a tight spot because some of the positions may now be taken by video listings. Fortunately, video is not that hard to produce, now more than ever, it’s quite easy to make viral video content that may find its way into the universal search results. All the major search engines are implementing new ways of showing search results. ASK is probably the best example, having been the first to actually go on and do this with its 3D search concept. Now, Google, Yahoo and Live Search are doing it too.

Pretty soon, it won’t be enough to practice standard online promotion techniques. Marketers are always quick to adopt new ways to reach potential customers, especially it there is a way to get more presence in search result pages, and that means competition may get ahead. If we were ever considering online video promotion, now is the time to make a decision, although, the way things are going we don’t really have a choice, do we? Multimedia results for search queries are already happening, with or without us.

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Wanna make money streaming sharing video content? It seems things are taking serious speed in online video content sharing. An alternative to Google’s AdSense video units is about to hit the public Internet space - Blinkx AdHoc!

First of all, Blinkx is not a new venture. It has been around since 2004 and was founded by Suranga Chandratillake. According to their own site “with an index of over 14 million hours of searchable video and more than 200 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it has cemented its position as the premier destination for online TV”. Blinkx features meida partners such as Reuters, BBC News, ITN, Forbes, Discovery Channel, MTV, HBO to name but a few from the list which features several dozen partners. I must say I wasn’t following this too closely, thinking Blinkx will probably be going with a different direction, but having read this post on C|NET News I realized I made an error in judgment.

So, what is Blinkx AdHoc? Well, in short it’s a platform that allows site visitors to view videos that are contextual with page content, or search for videos on their own. Blinkx already offers an API which enables webmasters to embed video search and show units on their sites. This is a move on the part of Blinkx which they say is a good way to remunerate webmasters who have already been using the Blinkx API earlier.

Based on blinkx’s ground-breaking AdHoc platform, the new widget places unobtrusive, highly-relevant text advertisements against embedded video from popular sharing sites such as YouTube, GoogleVideo and DailyMotion. blinkx will share 50 percent of the revenue generated from the ads with users, and payments will be facilitated through PayPal.

Similar to Google’s AdSense video units, Blinkx AdHoc will be showing contextual text ads which when clicked on will bring revenue to the site showing the videos (and Blinkx naturally). Blinkx boasts over 14 million hours of quality video content, so this initiative might prove to be very profitable for Blinkx AdHoc users.

The official press release on Blinkx invites people to sign-up, but after going to the AdHoc page I found the service start announcement for October 10, 2007, but no sign-up as yet. Probably in the works…

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This is not so new in concept, but what’s new is that now you can show YouTube videos on your site accompanied by relevant ads while playing in a customized embeddable video player. There are a couple of videos explaining this, but I chose this one:

It’s easy enough to get started by following instructions here (you have to link your AdSense account with your YouTube account). The same page also shows other video explaining AdSense video units.

UPDATE: Video units are only available for those based in the United States with English language websites. I only just realized I missed this small but important bit of information.

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Webmaster Tools will from now on feature more frequent data updates to ensure data freshness. This is something that has been sought by webmasters for a while. The new update frequency is for verified sites and has to do with crawling, indexing and search query stats.

According to this post on the Webmaster Central Blog, you will only see more frequent updates if your site actually gets new links over time. They are calling for comments and further suggestions, so head on over to the blog and drop them a note.

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I came across this site, Website Grader, which, well, attempts to grade a site giving it a score from 0-100%. I didn’t expect much to begin with, but decided to go ahead and see how one of the sites I was interested in did.

The system lets you enter a site’s URL, keywords you think are relevant, but also a site that you consider a competitor (which I thought was very useful). It takes a short while to generate the report since the tool queries various sources for information about the site in question (Google, Yahoo, Alexa, digg, Del.icio.us and so on). In the end a report is presented consisting of the following information:

• Google Page Rank (OK, interesting to know it, but not really a major indicator, just one of more than a hundred factors)
• web page structure (depending on the site, useful recommendations may be found in this section; the site I tested seemed to have too many keywords in the keywords meta tag, although the report clearly said this tag has pretty much no meaning for ranking, it did recommend a smaller number of keywords; also, there seemed to be tags on the page, which the tool recommends be replaced by proper CSS directives; OK this was useful)
• Domain info (nothing shown, but if there was something I would have seen the registrar, registration date, domain age, expiry date; this is subject to registration privacy settings I suppose, so didn’t expect to see too much here)
• Heading summary (no headings found; tool further explains headings are good to have on a page to enable easier understanding by visitors; OK, this is sound advice, although headings are easily replaced by similar CSS directives, so from an SEO standpoint headings might be good, but only if used properly/moderately)
• Image summary (I think this is pretty self-explanatory; lists image load requests on the page)
• Google indexed pages (this is pretty clear)
• Google crawl date (if recent and frequent means your site is updated over time which is good because it is deemed current and growing)
• Conversion methods (the tool recommended the use of RSS feeds for better conversion; RSS feeds are questionably convertible so this advice is under a question mark, but ok doesn’t hurt to try if nor already implemented)
• Inbound links (shows inbound links from Google and Yahoo; Google link count is not very useful because it simply isn’t accurate - the only way is to query Webmaster tools, but you already knew that right? Besides, even this is not 100% accurate, just gives an idea; Yahoo link count is perhaps deemed as more accurate, but also should be taken as a relative indicator, not as an absolute)
• Technorati ranking & Delicious bookmarks (are you using social bookmarking as means of getting traffic worthy links?)
• Alexa traffic ranking (this is not very useful; the whole concept of how Alexa works makes it very questionable in terms of analytical value so shouldn’t be taken too seriously; this is just an indicator of whether the site is continuously updated; if you add new content every day, your Alexa traffic rank will shrink (less is better) over time; of course you’d have to actually be getting at least some visitors at the same time, or it won’t work)
• Readability level (I guess this may be important from a usability POV, but not so much for SEO)