Question from an associate…
Off the wall google question for you. How do you get listings like the #1 slot here.
google sitelinks
My response:
You mean the sublistings aka “sitelinks” underneath of the #1? They are context-specific. They will show when Google thinks you are looking for a specific company and the #1 result is that company. Thus, you can have a #1 ranking and they won’t show up, unless the keywords show a direct match for what that site actually is.
Example:
search on “shoes” and you’ll see shoes.com is #1, but with no sitelinks
search on “shoes.com” and you’ll see shoes.com is #1, this time with sitelinks b/c Google thinks you are looking specifically for their site / company, not just “shoes” in general
This all said, you’ll only get the sitelinks when you site has a decent level of authority. That is, you’ll need to have a site with a little “link juice” that is on Google’s radar, not just a crappy little site with two inbound links. The links they show are generally their interpretation of the most important pages on your site. If your site architecture is good this might match up with your main navigation. That said, it could feature other pages too if they have a lot of inbound link juice or internal link juice to those specific pages.
I believe there also may be a feature too in Google Webmaster Tools to tweak these, but have not yet played around with it.
Also, here is Google’s commentary on sitelinks (aka sublinks).
FYI – since I took a few minutes on this I’m going to recycle on my blog…
August 5, 2008 at 9:26 pm
[...] Just Creative Design was upgraded from Google PageRank 3 to Google PR4 and we were also given some Google Sublinks (which you can see in the screenshot below). You can even reorganise the sublinks in Google’s [...]
August 10, 2008 at 5:03 pm
This is an interesting and useful article on the subject of Google Sitelinks. I found it useful I must admit. Another blog post on the same subject called What are Google Sitelinks? may be of use to your blog readers as well.