What are Sitelinks ? They are a collection of links, automatically chosen by Google’s algorithm, to appear below the result of website, linking to main pages of your website. They are randomly chosen, although you can block any link from appearing. We will discuss more about Sitelinks in the Google Sitelinks FAQ section below.

Recently, some of my websites got Sitelinks whilst I tried different ways of reaching this milestone.

Some time ago, Vanessa Fox, from the Webmaster’s Central blog, wrote that the page from the Google Help describing these Sitelinks, has been updated to reflect “information on how Google generates these links�. That’s crap to say the least, because that Google Help page about Sitelinks, just states that they exist, are automatically generated and nothing more.

Although no official explanation except this very basic page is offered by Google, I will try and write down a few of my own ideas, about when and how to get these Sitelinks for your website. Whilst I can’t promise you guys that ALL of the procedures below are involved in the process of making Sitelinks appear for your website, I can definitely guarantee you that SOME are.

The above are true mainly because I have always (during months / years) tried 4 to 6 procedures at a time so I can’t really know which one had the most important contribution to the appearance of Sitelinks.

 

Procedures which may be involved in the appearance of Sitelinks:

1. The number of links pointing to your website’s index page, using the several main keywords of your website as anchor. For example, for my blog, the two main keywords are “Cristian Mezei�, my name, and “SeoPedia� the name of my blog. Sitelinks appear only for a few main keywords, not for every keyword your website ranks for.
2. The number of searches and SERP clicks for the main keywords I described above. you have to have a certain number of clicks for that keyword, to be able to reach a minimum requirement for the appearance of Sitelinks. This makes keywords which are not searched enough, to never have Sitelinks. Although some of my coleagues have mentioned that traffic has nothing to do or has everything to do with Sitelinks, I firmly believe that traffic for a particular keyword or keyphrase is very important.
3. The number of indexed pages for the keyword you are targeting is also important. Please keep in mind that I am not discussing about the number of indexed pages for your website, but for the number of results shown in Google for that particular keyword.
4. The age of the website is definitely an aspect when deciding how and when Sitelinks appear. As far as my tests go, and using a naturally and organically built website (no extensive or forced SEO), you can NOT have Sitelinks if the website is younger than 18-24 months, varying from case to case.
5. You have to rank #1 for that particular keyword (and the ranking has to be stable) to be able to have any Sitelinks at all. This is very important and it has been proven true in 100% of times.

Misleading advices about Google Sitelinks

Whilst many other specialists and/or bloggers from the industry around the Internet have tried to help you figure out some ways to get Sitelinks, I will try to contradict them because some of those advices might not have a contribution to your effort, mainly because they are just too general and my experience says that they could be just loose-ends. Some of these advices might be:

• Making your website W3C valid. This is not a bad thing, but I highly doubt that it will make your website more prone to get Sitelinks. A lot of people have reported building their website with erratic code from 1992, and still having Sitelinks.
• Having links from powerful websites. I doubt that this aspect will help you in getting Sitelinks at all. Have a look at how I see inbound links having an effect, above (in the Procedures section).
• Having a lot of links (generally). I doubt that having tens of thousands of any links will move you up to the ladder, regarding Sitelinks. Whilst links will help I have explained above (in the Procedures section), specifically, in what way they will help.
• Some advices were really something like : “Make the website usefulâ€� or “Add Meta tagsâ€�. Whilst these are surely helpful for any website, they may have nothing to do with your website getting Sitelinks.
• Having a very well designed navigation menu. There were websites which had erratic or very well designed navigation menus and links within the website and still they all got Sitelinks.
• Pagerank has nothing to do with Sitelinks. There are PR7 and PR2 websites that got Sitelinks.

Although I don’t want to contradict (I just did that, but well .. ) my fellow colleagues, the above are my personal opinions and I wanted to stress them out. The reason I didn’t named names is obvious.

And as the title of my post says, below you’ll get the FAQ section, where I tried to answer most, if not all the questions that poped up in the past year, from all kinds of readers or people:

Google Sitelinks: The FAQ

Q: When are Sitelinks generated ? Is there some kind of Pagerank-alike update ?
A: I do want to stress out that about 4 of my websites got Sitelinks in exactly the same 1-2 day period, although the websites are very different one from another. One is 2 years old, another is 3,5. One has 1000 links, the other has 40.000 links. One is in the auto domain one is my blog. They are not linked in-between them. So all of this makes me think that there is some kind of general update of the Sitelinks, much like the updates for Pagerank, Inbound links or Google Images. Since QOT got their Sitelinks on exactly the same day (6th Feb.) as many of my other websites, I am positive that there is a general Sitelinks update.

Q: I can’t see any Sitelinks generated within my Sitemaps account, although they appear in Google!
A: Sitelinks take anywhere from 2 weeks to 1 month to appear within your Sitemaps account, after they first appeared in the SERPs. Then you will have better control over some of the links.

Q: Why doesn’t my very important “Clients� page get in the Sitelinks section ?
A: This may have to do with the fact that Sitelinks are usually generated from the first level links only. This means that if you have a page reachable by two clicks, it will never be included in the Sitelinks section. On rare occasions, deeplinks will be chosen, but I am not sure as to how these websites are chosen. Also make sure that you have pure HTML links. No Javascript or Flash.

Q: My website doesn’t have too much text links. Does this mean I’m doomed ?
A: Google will generate Sitelinks from image links too, as long as the image has the ALT tag. As other people have found too, it seems that the Sitelinks algorithm may chose a Sitelink even if you have no link towards it from your website, but in exchange, the page has a large number of links from other websites.

Q: What’s the point of having these stupid Sitelinks ?
A: One simple and huge reason: Trust and brand. Sitelinks have began to resemble trust lately in the eyes of the normal surfer (not to us SEMs, simply because we know there are heavily penalized websites who still got Sitelinks), so any website who has them is more prone to get clicks from the SERPs, from the search terms that show Sitelinks.

Q: What’s the minimum and maximum number of Sitelinks I’ll get ?
A: Minimum 2, maximum 8. Nevertheless I still can’t figure it out how Google assigns the number of Sitelinks to each website, except popularity. Most of my popular websites have 8. Most of my not-so-popular websites have 2 to 4.

Q: I don’t have a Google Sitemaps account. Will I still get Sitelinks ?
A: Definitely. The only drawback is that you will not have any control over them.

Q: How are the Sitelinks calculated ? Which links get in and which not ?
A: There are all kinds of opinions. After closely studying all my websites, I myself will still believe that they are chosen randomly. Not after traffic, not after inbound links. There’s an interesting thread at SEW which you might want to read to get some speculation.

Q: I have a page in the Sitelinks section that doesn’t exist anymore. What should I do ?
A: It appears that the crawl delay of the Sitelinks is at least one month. So if you have a page that doesn’t exist anymore, try to 301 redirect it to the new one. The Sitelinks will then work ok.

Q: In my Sitemaps account I can remove Sitelinks if I don’t like them ?
A: Indeed you can. But please be careful when you do that, because if you remove a Sitelink it will not get replaced by another. This means that if you had 6 Sitelinks, and you block one because it’s not appropiate, you will be left with 5 Sitelinks in the Google SERPs. The 6th one will not be replaced with a new Sitelinks.

Vanessa Fox Nude forgotten all important post

The title is just a teaser for Vanessa. She’s had that Nude thing like forever :)

For you guys who don’t know Vanessa, she’s been the women who lead the Google Webmasters Central team until she moved to Zillow.

In this section I’ll analyze the post she made on her blog right after she left Google. I’m actually amazed to see how I can’t any reactions to this post, since IMHO it’s the most important post about Sitelinks ever. More important than what Google has released and certainly more important then I or my colleagues speculate, simply because she’s been involved in the process of releasing the Sitelinks. Block quotes are quotes from Vanessa’s post:

For instance, if I do a Google search for [duke’s chower house seattle], am I looking for directions? Hours? A menu? Google doesn’t know, so they offer up several suggestions. (Quality aside: a link to the menu shows up in the sitelinks, but if you do a search for [duke’s chowder house seattle menu], that same link doesn’t show up on the first page. In fact, no pages from the Duke’s site show up.)

Basically, what Vanessa is telling us is that Sitelinks will NEVER appear for specific search terms. So that’s why we get Sitelinks for “Computers� or “Cristian Mezei� or “HP� or generally, company names as well as very general industry terms.

Google autogenerates the list of sitelinks at least in part from internal links from the home page. You’ll notice in the Duke’s example that one of the sitelinks is “five great locations� which also appears as primary navigation on the Duke’s home page. If you want to influence the sitelinks that appear for your site, make sure that your home page includes the links you want and that those links are easy to crawl (in HTML rather than Flash or Javascript, for instance) and have short anchor text that’ll fit in a sitelinks listing. They’ll also have to be relevant links. You can’t just put your Buy Cheap Viagra now link on the home page of your elementary school site and hope for the best.

In the above, Vanessa confirms me what I already told you in the FAQ section above. Sitelinks will be chosen from links present in the homepage only. I still firmly believe that some websites have Sitelinks from deeplinks within the website. How and when these websites are chosen, is still a mystery.

One more important thing we learn is that Sitelinks are chosen from relevant links in the homepage. Instead of repeating what Vanessa said about relevance, read the above quote.

There is a lot of other useful information inside Vanessa’s post, but since I already tackled those points in my previous sections, I left them aside.

Other opinions about Sitelinks

I asked a colleague of mine involved in SEM too, what he thinks about Sitemaps. I thought to put his answer here as well:

Cristian asked me about my opinion regarding Sitelinks. Breaking this question in small parts, here are my thoughts.

The sitelink option in the Google results are similar with the siteinfo.xml provided for the Alexa toolbar, a simple option for a webmaster to provide most important direct links to his website structure. Google version of Siteinfo is different because you cannot specify WHICH link in your website is a Sitelink. You can only ask remove one link from the Sitelinks (Google Webmaster panel option).

Why are the Sitelinks appearing, when and under which algorithm? The algorithm used is totally automated and is taking in consideration the following criteria’s:

• Old powerful website.
• The sitelinks are pages which are coming on first position in SERPs.
• The sitelinks are most of the time associated with top results related words: “domainâ€�, “domain downloadâ€�, “domain demoâ€� etc.
• The sitelinks are probably not influenced by PageRank.

from: seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/google-sitelinks-the-ultimate-faq/

Tags: age, ark, blogger, code, computer, count, download, engine, etc, Google, Google, IDE, image, Internet, Keyword, keywords, list, Nevertheless, option, page, PHP, proc, process, PROM, ranking, release, relevance, search, SEF, SEM, SEO, SEO, site rank, Sites, stable, traffic, XP

Ciprian has just uploaded all the recent tools he and his team have developed, and has bundled them all in one single SEO & webmaster tools package.

I have been using the previous home for some of these tools for some time now, mainly because almost all the tools had tens of datacenters on which you could’ve searched for information, including indexed pages, backlinks and cache times.

Since most of the multiple datacenters tools are restricted to Pagerank and (very few) to indexed pages, Ciprian’s tools were a Godsend.

There a lot of basic tools in the collection. Nevertheless the ones that really help me are the SEO strength (a complete package of the basic stats like backlinks, indexed pages and PR), indexed pages, inbound links, Google keyword ranking and the Google cache.

I think Ciprian should work on the keyword research tool a little bit more. It gives me some wierd results.

Leaving that aside, Ciprian, I think you should also put a link to the Google SERPs, on all the datacenters in the results pages of the SEO tools, so that users can check that result in real time too.

Like most other similar services on the web, Ciprian’s tools have their share of downtime, slow response times and timeouts, but the team is working hard to improve these problems every day.

None of the tools require any user account and they are all free for unlimited use. Have fun.

 

source:www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/google-sitelinks-the-ultimate-faq/

Tags: adding, age, ark, count, dev, downtime, Free, Google, IDE, image, Internet, Keyword, Nevertheless, page, Plugins, ranking, search, SEO, SEO, Timeout, XP

The question some people ask is whether or not pdf documents pass page rank?

Based on my testing, the answer is decidedly yes, but there is still a question of how much weight they are given. I believe they pass at least equal weight as an html page. Nevertheless, optimizing for pdfs makes sense since you are already taking the time to create the darn things anyway.

Here are some tips that could dramatically improve your pdfs search engine friendliness:

1. After you perform keyword research, include active links with your theme keywords as text within your pdf. This works just like any other kind of anchor text linking. You are given keyword Theme Ranking and just like when you include anchor text in a web page. My theory is that you are given quite a bit more if the subject matter of the pdf is on theme and on topic. Further testing will determine exactly how much PR is passed. I believe having active links inside a pdf pointing to your website does increase your search engine ranking for terms targeted, just like having the word video in the anchor text with your targeted keyword now seems to give an inbound link more Page Rank.

2. Hopefully it is pretty obvious that you should use formatable text within your pdf because search engines do not really see text within images- or at least not proficiently. (That is another topic). Basically treat the document like it is html when deciding where to bold and italics. Make sure that you use your keywords in the title etc.

3. Make sure that you do not use only images and that you use text for direct response marketing purposes other wise your listing on the search engines results page will not be clickable.

4. In order to get your pdf indexed by the search engines, link to the pdf from a page that is already indexed. I know it does not sound like rocket science- and yet so many people forget to do this.

5. Be sure to BRAND your pdf so that when people actually click on your pdf they can at least find your website or contact you by snail mail or phone. It is probably a good idea to create a hyperlink to your website of landing page.

6. Before you publish your pdf, double check to make sure that your intended links are truly active and hyperlinked.

PDF Creation Tip:

Be advised that Acrobat Reader (Adobe) has no way to create active hyperlinks. This is one of the feature to the Acrobat Standard 7.0). There are other cheaper software packages that will create active hyperlinks, but they are not always accurate, so you will need to double check.

If you have gone from Microsoft Word and create a pdf in Acrobat Professional, the links should automatically be active in your pdf document when you render it.

Using Adobe Acrobat Meta-data Function:

This is a confusing topic. Adobe Professional does have a function tab that allegedly allows you to insert meta data into a pdf document:

Apparently this function is still an area of mass confusion. Nobody seems to agree if it is worth your extra time to fill this box out in Adobe.

This is because several expert SEOs have tried to figure out exactly what is happening when you add the meta-data to Adobe Acrobat Professional.

There is an excellent article on this here:

SEO your PDFs

I will do some more testing on this, but right now I am pretty much ignoring this function until I am certain how Adobe handles the xml, and how that works with the search engine spiders.

Analyzing the Metrics:

You can use tracking software like Click Tracks to monitor and test the keyword click thru rate on your pdf files. If you target the correct market long tail topics and keywords, you should be able to generate decent traffic to the deeper pages in your website.

Tags: age, ark, etc, IDE, image, list, Nevertheless, page, RAM, ranking, search, Search Engines, SEO, SEO, Software, Sound, traffic, Video

Gartner has embarked on a wide-reaching new study of Google and its potential impact on IT, enterprise businesses, and society in general in the coming years. On April 10 at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2008 in Las Vegas, Gartner Vice President Richard Hunter revealed some of the first data points from this study.

The two most interesting points were:

1.) The best way to think of Google is as a disruptive technology.

2.) Disruptive technologies create big losers and big winners, and one of the biggest losers in the Google disruption could be traditional IT departments.
Google as a disruptive technology

This new study is being conducted by a team of 15 Gartner researchers, led by Hunter, and the full report will be published in mid-2008. The title of Hunter’s presentation at ITxpo was “What Does Google Know?� The answer to that question was even more sobering than I expected, as the slide below demonstrates.

Hunter added that Google will know a lot more about what’s sold on the Web if Google Checkout takes off, and could soon know a lot about medicine and health patterns if Google Health Records gets adopted.

The Gartner researchers have estimated that Google technology can address 100 exabytes of data (an exabyte is equal to a billion gigabytes). “Their infrastructure has unprecedented scale,� said Hunter, “and what is even more impressive is their ability to connect vast quantities of information… Google is sitting on the biggest pile of information that has ever been collected in the world.�

The reason why Gartner chose to characterize Google as a disruptive technology - rather than just an Internet search engine company - is due to the ambitions that Google has for all of that data and the potential impact that those ambitions could have on the technology industry.

“Where the previous [computing] paradigm has been about my computer, my technology, my stuff … Google is trying to deliver any information, anywhere, to anyone in the world, on any device,� said Hunter.

“Google’s paradigm is a different paradigm. It’s an open source paradigm… We’re about to see a war of paradigms.� Clearly, the leader of the “previous paradigm� and the counter-movement to Google is Microsoft.

However, we also can’t forget that the Google paradigm includes massive privacy concerns. Hunter noted that Google continues to struggle to find the right balance between privacy, security, and its legitimate business interests. The more data Google collects, the bigger and more valuable target it becomes for electronic criminals. That will also make it a bigger target for governments, politicians, and citizen groups.

Hunter stated, “We believe Google’s information security will be a political issue worldwide by the end of the year in 2010.�

Here are few other interesting quotes from Hunter’s presentation, based on the study:

* “Google transcends the limits of the traditional OSI stack.�
* “We don’t know how good Google’s information security is.�
* “Google doesn’t worry about resources. Google’s always got more resources.�
* “Ask not what Google will do to you. Ask what you can do with Google … Ask how much of your business you want to expose to Google.�
* “Above all, move fast, because Google is moving fast.�

Google’s disruption to IT

“Google is disruptive and disruptive technologies produce big winners and big losers,� Hunter said, “One of the big losers is potentially traditional IT departments.�

As part of his presentation, Hunter specifically noted a number of ways in which the Google revolution would disrupt the IT industry in general:

* Traditional database management vendors would be marginalized into handling only high value transactions
* Enterprises will co-opt Google’s approach to data management and Google could host the data
* Proprietary applications such as Microsoft Office would be “deeply threatened�
* Many application builders could start developing on top of the Google platform
* Collaboration services will take a big leap and Google could provide the platform
* Companies will take major parts of the IT infrastructure (e.g. e-mail, storage, and business intelligence) and source it to Google.

However, after the presentation I followed up with Richard to get further clarification on how IT departments could be significant losers in the Google disruption. Here was his response:

“Google has the potential to be the first-choice provider of many services that are now handled by internal IT organizations, starting with non-competitively-differentiating services such as email (which Google already provides to a number of enterprises), and ultimately including high-value-added functions and services such as business intelligence, mobile sales support, and others. Some IT organizations might consider it a boon to pass these functions on to Google so that the IT department can concentrate on very enterprise-specific competitively differentiating applications. IT organizations that measure their worth in terms of how much of the company’s IT needs they supply themselves will be less happy to see Google move in on their turf-and I do mean specifically that in many cases it will be an argument about turf, not enterprise value.

“An important question is: can Google provide the quality (e.g. reliability, availability, security, etc.) that enterprises-a more demanding market compared to individual consumers-require from their suppliers? Consumers are satisfied when the potential provider says ‘Of course!’ Smart enterprises demand certification from someone besides the provider. Providing that certification will be something new for Google. On the other hand, many IT organizations aren’t mature enough to provide proof of their own capabilities in terms of value for money, and so will have a difficult time proving superiority over any external provider, whether or not it’s Google�.
Bottom line for IT leaders

What Gartner is arguing is that Google’s database and data center magic is creating a massive cultural movement and a competitive advantage that is going to sweep away businesses and industries and transform the technology world. In fact, Gartner sees Google becoming so large and powerful from a data storage and access standpoint that it is going to attract scrutiny - and potential regulations - from governments.

While these predictions have legs, several of the trends are larger than Google. As far as IT departments go, there are two related trends that will transform IT over the next decade: utility computing and managed services. The utility computing model will allow IT departments to deploy only the computing capacity that is needed and to track it and charge it to the appropriate business unit, department, or project. That will allow IT to tie the value of technology much more closely to business decisions.

Some businesses won’t want to handle that type of IT internally and so they will outsource it to providers like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, EDS, and Verizon Business. It’s unclear whether Google will want to get into the managed services business, but it might make sense for them partner with vendors like the four mentioned in order to offer services such as e-mail, storage, and business intelligence.

In terms of Google’s technical advantage - part of which is tied to its sheer data center capacity - let’s not forget that the other two big data center builders, Microsoft and Yahoo, could tie the knot soon and became a much more potent threat to Google’s vision. That could especially be the case if Microsoft allows its new technology leader, Ray Ozzie, to drive Microsoft in a much more Google-like direction centered around cloud computing. It’s also not a given that what Google has created in the world’s largest and most effective database isn’t something that Microsoft will eventually catch up to and co-opt.

Nevertheless, Google is obviously on the leading edge many of the trends that are powering the next breaking waves in the technology industry, and the effects of these trends will fundamentally change the way corporate IT departments are organized, operated, and financed over the next decade.

Tags: computer, disruptive technology, Google, Google’s always, Nevertheless, search, Uncategorized