Branded Sitelinks are Taking Over Page 1

After months of testing, Google has officially released a larger and controversial version of sitelinks within their search results. Sitelinks are a familiar sight within the search results. They're essentially a user friendly list of popular pages within a site, sending users directly to a specific page within a site instead of having to navigate from the home page.

For example, if you'd like to find a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instead of having to go to the homepage and navigate to the Careers page, Google makes it one click away from the search results by including it in their sitelinks.

Well, Google has taken this from a user friendly link and expanded the top sitelinks to take over most of the first page. The links are now full sized text and each have their own small green URL at the bottom along with a brief description of the link. So basically the sitelinks of branded sites now have as much as a dozen mini site listings included.

Outside of some of the visual changes are some algorithm changes. Google has changed it so that your sitelinks bring in equal amounts of pagerank as the main search link does, and now instead of a maximum of 8 sitelinks you can have up to 12.

So what does this mean? Well now instead of having a main link that pops up in the SERPs you have up to 12 additional links that will bring people into your site, and it all takes up a large chunk of the user’s screen. So if your site is lucky enough to be included in this change, then you now have up to 12 landing pages coming in from Google. If this is the case then hopefully you've been hard at work treating every page like a landing page and not just the home page. However, if that is not the case then now’s the time to get to work. Each page is just as prominent and visually significant as your home page.

How much control do you have? You have the ability to choose the sitelinks you'd like to include within your Webmaster tools, however these are more of a suggestion. You can choose to demote some pages from sitelinks, but Google has stated that demotions might not mean that your page won'...