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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