Patrick Stox
Patrick Stox is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The Art of SEO 4th Edition. He’s an organizer for several groups including the Raleigh SEO Meetup (the most successful SEO Meetup in the US), the Beer and SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit.
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Sitelinks are links to other pages or sections of a page that appear below some Google search results.They help users navigate to relevant information on a website quickly. Sitelinks first appeared in 2005 and were officially announced in 2006. Here’s an example: Sitelinks are one of the most common search features.They appear in 1.8% of SERPsin Ahrefs’ US database. Nearly every branded term has sitelinks and they also appear on many other queries like informational queries. In fact, nearly67% of all organic keywords for Wikipedia.org contain sitelinks. Let’s dive deeper into some common questions around: Sitelinks have evolved over the years and display in many different ways. Google is often changing things such as the number of sitelinks shown and the appearance of sitelinks in the search results. You may see some sitelinks with outlines, with images, in a carousel format, or ones that expand. Here are different types of sitelinks that Google showstoday. I’m mostly going to cover organic sitelinks in this article, but I wanted to point out that sitelink extensionscanappear on ads. The biggest difference between paid sitelinks and other types of sitelinks is that you can easily control the text and URLs that are displayed with your ads.Other types of sitelinks are automatically generated and rely on algorithms to determine the content andlinks. These sitelinks appear for mostly branded terms and contain up to six sitelinks to other pages on your website.They only appear on the top search result. One-line sitelinks can appear on many types of queries. They typically contain up to four sitelinks but there is a variation that displays more sitelinks in a carousel. These sitelinks can go to other pages on a site or jump directly to content within pages using fragment (#)links. A sitelinks search boxallows users to search and jump directly to the search results of a website or app. This only appears for branded terms and is added automatically by Google. You can help them understand your site better by adding the structured datafor a sitelinks search box to your homepage, but it’s not required and doesn’t make it more likely that a sitelinks search box will show in search results. Many tools and reports within Ahrefs contain filters for sitelinks as a SERP feature. For example, you can find keywords that you rank for in Ahrefs’ Site Explorerthat also have sitelinks. Sitelinks give you morevisibilityin the search results. The additional links take up more space and also make your site stand out from other search results. With sitelinks, you’re also helping users get to content that they might want faster. This could be content in a page or on a different page. For example, according to Google Search Consoledata, 12.9% of clicks on our branded search “ahrefs” go to the sitelinks rather than the homepage. You can’t edit sitelinks in the organic search results. They’re algorithmically generated. You used to be able to demote them in Google Search Console, but unfortunately Google removed this option. However, there are a few ways to influence them. In Ahrefs, you can see the keywords that trigger sitelinks for your site, and which pages feature in them. Just head to the Organic Keywordsreport in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, select “Sitelinks” from the SERP features dropdown, then toggle the “Only linking to target” box. If you feel a result is not what should be showing, use the information above to make changes that may impact the sitelinks shown. Sitelinks offer more real estate in the SERPs to websites and are useful to users. While there’s no direct controls for sitelinks, you can use the information above to influence what sitelinks show and obtain new sitelinks. Have questions? Let me know on Twitter.Paid sitelinks
Organic sitelinks
Organic one-line sitelinks
Organic sitelinks search box
<meta name="google" content="nositelinkssearchbox"/>
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