Sitelinks Under Your Search Result

The links under your name

Search for your business by name and the first result may carry a block of extra links beneath it: Contact, Services, Book Online, About Us.

These are sitelinks. They let a searcher jump straight to the page they wanted, and they make your result take up more of the screen.

Most of the time they help. Occasionally one of them is a page nobody meant to keep: last spring's sale, a staff member who has left, an event that already happened.

Owners usually find out when a customer mentions it.

Where they come from

Google chooses sitelinks automatically. It shows them mostly when it is confident the searcher wants one particular site, which usually means a search for the business name.

There is no setting to pick them. Search Console no longer has even the option it once offered for demoting a sitelink, so the only influence is the site itself.

The links under ads are a different thing. Sitelink extensions in AdWords are written by the advertiser and appear only with the ad, so changing them does nothing to the ordinary result.

Pages that end up there by accident

When an odd sitelink appears, it is nearly always one of a few kinds of page.

• A finished promotion that was linked from the home page for weeks.
• A past event with its own page and a clear title.
• A staff page for someone who has left.
• A discontinued product or service still in the menu.
• A test or duplicate page left published after a redesign.
• An old PDF, such as a price list.

The first is the most common, for a simple reason. A sale page collects links from the home page, from emails and from social posts, and all of them make it look important long after the sale has ended.

What you can influence

Google works out sitelinks from what the site says about its own structure. Three things carry most of that.

The main menu, because pages linked from every page are clearly the important ones. Page titles, because they say what each page is. And the words in links pointing to a page, which often become the sitelink's label.

A menu with plain labels such as Services, Prices and Contact gives Google sensible choices. A menu labelled Discover, Explore and Learn More gives it very little to go on.

Page titles do most of the work

Each important page needs its own title: the words on its browser tab, which usually also become the headline of its search result. It should say what the page is and differ from every other page's title.

Sites built from a theme sometimes give every page the same title, or the business name alone. Google then has to guess what each page is, and the sitelinks come out vaguer.

Fixing the titles of the six or seven pages that matter most is an hour's work, and it improves the ordinary results as well as the sitelinks.

A worked example

A barbecue and grill store in a suburban retail park sells gas grills, pellet smokers and charcoal, and services grills in a workshop at the back.

A search for its name showed four sitelinks: Gas Grills, Contact, Smokers and Spring Clearance Sale. The sale had ended fourteen months earlier, and the page still showed the sale prices.

Customers phoned asking for clearance prices on grills that had since gone up. One came into the store with the page open on his phone.

The page had been linked from the home page banner and the footer for a whole spring, shared on the store's Facebook page, and never unpublished. The footer link was still there.

The store removed the footer link, redirected the sale page permanently to the current grills page, and asked Google to crawl it again with Fetch as Google in Search Console.

A few weeks later the sale link was gone. Google chose the parts and service page in its place, which nobody had asked for and nobody minded.

When an outdated page shows up

Decide first whether the page should exist at all. If its information is still useful, update it so the sitelink becomes right rather than wrong.

If a current page covers the same ground, redirect the old address to it permanently, with what is called a 301 redirect, so visitors and Google both land somewhere useful.

If nothing replaces it, delete it, and make sure the address returns a proper not-found response rather than a blank page. Then take it out of the menu, the footer and the sitemap.

A page that must stay online, perhaps because a printed flyer points to it, can carry a noindex tag instead: a line in its code asking search engines not to list it.

While the change takes effect

Sitelinks change when Google crawls the pages involved again, which can take days or several weeks.

Fetch as Google lets you ask for a page to be crawled sooner.

For an urgent case, Search Console's Remove URLs tool hides an address from results for about ninety days, long enough for the permanent fix to take hold.

The removal tool is a stopgap. Used without fixing the page, it only postpones the same sitelink by three months.

The counter-case

Sitelinks are a small part of search. A business whose name brings up its own site, with sensible links underneath, has nothing to do here.

A site with very few pages, or a business name shared with others, may never show sitelinks at all, and there is no way to ask for them.

And reorganising a working menu purely to change sitelinks is rarely worth it. Fix the outdated pages and the titles, and let the rest follow.

The check

1. Search your business name on a computer and phone.
2. Note each sitelink and the page it opens.
3. Update, redirect or remove any outdated page.
4. Take dead pages out of menus and footers.
5. Give each main page its own clear title.
6. Use plain menu labels for the main pages.
7. Request a new crawl of the changed pages.

Step four is the one that usually gets skipped. A redirected or deleted page that is still linked from the footer keeps telling Google it matters, and the stale sitelink can return.

Another way Google changes how your result looks in search is covered in accelerated mobile pages for a small business site.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.