This is part of a 2 parts article. Initially this was supposed to be a one part and to be called “Why being #1 in DOESN’T matter”. But in a very short time window things have changed.

So, moving to the subject. Google recently announced that their Sitelinks feature from the SERPs has doubled the number of items from 4 to 8. Even though this has been announced only 7th december, I’ve seen it active for over a month.

Why Sitelinks are important? Well, take it this way. If you are #1 for a query, a user has 9(NINE!) access points to your website. Nine access points that are above the fold. You really couldn’t ask for more.

If you look at what Google says about Sitelinks, you’ll see that they are pretty vague and mysterious about it and they give you no hints on how you can control them.

Here are a few hints based on my experience:

• Sitelinks appear only when a query shows your main page as #1. I haven’t seen any examples for secondary pages, but it also applies for the first page of a subdomain. Usually any query can trigger sitelinks, but I’ve seen a few examples where it doesn’t.
  • TIP: Start again optimizing your main page for high traffic keywords
• Sitelinks are available for Google.com and in very few cases for international domains.
  • TIP: plan your optimization with the .com in mind and the rest will follow
• Sitelinks appear for old domains in general. My site where I’ve observed them is 2 years old
  • TIP: if you are #1 and you don’t have sitelinks, don’t pannic. They will appear in time
• Sitelinks appear for high volume of content.
  • TIP: My site has ~3000 pages. If you have very few pages, start creating content.
• Sitelinks are in fact, pages that have the most internal links (in your site). That’s why you will usually see sitelinks that mirror a website menu (menu links are on all pages).
  • TIP: This is valuable information about how Sitelinks are created. Try to determine what are the most important 8 pages within your website (beside the homepage) and get to work. Use nofollow on site wide links that are not important and link those 8 pages from every page. For those 8 links try using the following in any combination: title attribute, strong/em tag, h1,2,3.
• Sitelinks labels. It seems that those are extracted from the text of the links and not from the title or other content on the page.
  • TIP: Pay attention on how you are linking your target pages and keep the same text all over the site. For maximum effect, try using a maximum of 2 words.
• Even though you cannot control directly what sitelinks you have, you can remove unwaanted ones.
  • TIP: In order to do that, you need to have a Google Webmaster Account and your site authenticated. If you already have Sitelinks for your site, you’ll find them there and you can block those that are innacurate. It takes ~7days for the changes to propagate in the SERPs. Note that once you remove a link, it will not be automatically replaced with another. For my website I have removed 2 links that weren’t appropriate and now I have only 6. Perhaps in time Google will add another 2.
• Google Operating System mentions another factor: traffic data. Basically this implies that Google uses data gathered trough Google Toolbar (or other analytics means like Google Analytics or Google Adsense) to determine what are your most visited pages. Looking at my Sitelinks and at my top 50 pages I cannot say that this is 100% correct. Only 2 out of 8 pages could have been turned into sitelinks through this. Even if this is true, it looks that it doesn’t matter how much traffic you receive from Google but your general traffic for a specific page:
  • TIP: In order to control the traffic for a specific page, here are a few things that you can do.
    • Design your layout in such way that your target pages receive the most traffic
    • Use social tools (digg, del.icio.us,stumble upon) to dirrect traffic to your most important 8 pages.

Well this is all. Hope you find this useful in your SEO efforts. If your lucky enough to have sitelinks, start optimizing those pages for the best conversion, and if you don’t have them right now, I hope that this guide will help you.

See you on the second part to learn why being #1 is not so important and what you can do to make it important