Sitelinks

I’ve talked about the little treasures that are Google Sitelinks before. They show up when you search for big name sites by big name. They are something that a lot of webmasters and bloggers hope to achieve as they do represent some kind of approval for a site by Google and we all want to please the big G don’t we? My other sites all now show up with sitelinks in the SERPs, e.g. search for Sciencebase and you’ll see what I mean.

Search for your domain without the “.com” and see if they show up. Even if they’re not showing up in the SERPs just yet, if you check your Google Webmaster Tools for your site and follow the Links and then SiteLinks links in the menu you’ll get to a page that shows you whether Google has or has not created Sitelinks for your site. Funnily enough, I hadn’t checked Sig Figs for a while and got a pleasant surprise today to find it now displays Sitelinks (in GWMT). It’s only a matter of time before they get pushed up into the SERPs too.

There is bigger news to come for Sitelinks followers, however. Google has now gone open with an entirely new tool, a search box that appears below Sitelinks in the SERPs and allows you to search the site in question. For instance, if you’re after information on the Hubble Telescope, you might search for NASA and then visit the NASA page and search from there for Hubble. Not any more, with the Sitelinks search box appearing in the SERPs you get to search the NASA site direct from the Google search results.

Unfortunately, while Google thinks Sciencebase is important and Sig Figs is almost important, neither are quite so important as NASA (in the eyes of Googlebot, at least).