SEO Tip: Google Sitelinks = Clue To Authority Status? April 24, 2008
Posted by Andrew Wee in : search engine optmization (SEO) , trackbackI’ve been looking into this issue for some time, and noticed some trends in the results Google shows.
For “Andrew Wee” from a Singapore IP, here’s the result:
But if I do the same search using a US IP:
Spot the difference?
The expanded listing you see above are what Google calls “Sitelinks”
Some have said sitelinks could be an indicator of your site’s status as an authority site in Google’s eyes.
If that’s true, it makes sense, because about 70-80% of my traffic comes from the US, while about 10% comes from Singapore.
So traffic weightage plays a part in the display of sitelinks.
Back in her Google Webmaster Central days, Vanessa Fox notes that the sitelinks are generated according to an algorithm.
Another finding seems to be that Google is serving up different results depending on your geographic origin. If you’re a major US player, the display of sitelinks might not hold for someone coming from Japan or the UK.
Some interesting food for thought in your site planning efforts.
Popularity: 6%
Text Blog feed
Any clues as to what you gotta do to make this happen? Did you implement a specific strategy?
I’ve focused on producing original, useful content from day 1.
by the way, i see SEO and traffic as just one of the side benefits.
The end goal is usually something altogether different like building your business, increasing sales, establishing a brand – which are more interesting and more importantly, meaningful than just ranking in the search engine results…
I have sitelinks that show up searching for my sitename, but they don’t for the few keywords I rank first on google.
To me, it only means you have a good internal link structure, but nothing to do with site authority, which honestly, I do not have.
Still it can be a good indicator that you are on the right way.
1) How does Google know your site traffic (for sites that don’t have Google Analytics installed).
2) Do any sites have sitelinks when you use the Singapore IP? How can you be sure it’s not just a system difference between how Google displays results for those two markets (US and Singapore).
1) Google can track user behavior across all of it’s properties – Adsense, Adwords, Gmail, the google search engine, blogger, Google News, Google Trends.
They own quite a number of big pieces of the internet.
2) Yes, lots of sites have sitelinks from my Singapore IP.
If you have an IP rotator, you will find China sites with sitelinks from a China IP too.
I think it’s more a sign of the geographic variation/importance in the way in which google display results to users.
Remember, “the user experience” has always been Google’s focus (even to the chagrin of adwords advertisers)
So what I am curious about is how you got all those statistic snippets across the bottom of each listing. Please share.
Besides the SEO Quake toolbar at SEOQuake.com, you can also check out Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox extension over at SEOBook.com.
Then there’s SEOdigger.com and the entire myriad of SEO/analytics tools like compete.com quantcast.com etc.
Those statistical snippets are from the Firefox Seo Quake toolbar that you can download for free.
Thanks for an interesting discussion. What is the situation with sitelinks when it comes to Wordpress blogs? Do these qualify? Anything specific one needs to do, more than providing useful content and a good structure?
one of my wordpress sites shows sitelinks for “pinkdeals”. however, the problem with mine is that it’s showing a few post URLs and for an aff site those aren’t the pages I want in the sitelinks… i’ll have to have a closer look into that soon…