Google announced this week in a blog post that it has made a significant update to one of its search features called sitelinks, which you may know as those small links you see beneath the main webpage when you search for certain key terms on Google.
Now when you search, you will find a mini description for each link that shows beneath each result, and the full web address of that page also now appears under each link description. You will also now find 12 sitelinks , instead of the 8 links which would have shown previously. Google also confirmed in the their blog post that they are making significant improvements to their search algorithms, which will see them combine the sitelink ranking and the regular result rankings in a hope to provide a higher quality list of links for the user.
According to Daniel Rocha who is one of the Software Engineers in the sitelinks Team at Google, this feature “is particularly handy for large and complex websites. Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.”
Below is an example of how our website is now displayed on Google with the new sitelinks.
The new update will become effective over the next few days for everyone and will be supported in all modern browsers.
Overall the new sitelinks will make the user experience much quicker and easier, and far more relevant from what we have seen before. What do you think of the new sitelinks? And will they have an impact on SEO ?
Matthew Marley
360innovate
