First Google Search Result (SEO?)

Question

When a site gets into the first position of Google's organic search results, Google sometimes renders additional links for the sections of that website. For example, if you search for jQuery, jQuery.com is the first search results. In addition to a link to jQuery.com, the jQuery Documentation, Tutorials, Plugins, Download, Works, Ui, About, and Donate page links are included too (all in the first listing.)

In contrast, the first result for a Google search for Beer, returns a single link to the wikipedia.org entry for beer.

My QUESTION is what if anything do sites like jQuery do to get the "extended" Google search result listing?

Answer 1

They're called sitelinks, automatically generated by Google.

From Webmaster tools:

Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site's contents.

Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.

Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they'll be useful to the user. If your site's structure doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user's query, we won't show them. However, we are always working to improve how we find and display sitelinks.

Answer 2

It's down to Google to choose if you get these links (and what they are). Once assigned, the webmaster can remove some of the auto-chosen links using Google Webmaster Tools (http://google.com/webmasters/tools/)

Answer 3

Those extra links are called sitelinks. Google generates them automatically once your site has reached a certain threshold of pagerank and number of pages indexed. Google being Google, these thresholds and the algorithm for selecting the links is not revealed :)

Once sitelinks have been identified on your page, you can view them on your Google Webmaster account. If Google has picked links that you don't want to appear any longer (e.g. big January sale that was heavily pushed pre-Christmas, no longer relevant in February), you can tell Google to de-list them here. You can't yet suggest links you'd like as sitelinks however.

From Google:

At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

There are a number of different theories about how best to get Google to pick up your intended sitelinks, but in the end most boil down to having a well-structured layout, which is easily navigable for both human and bot visitors.

• Create structured navigation menus using HTML features like unordered lists (UL) and text links

• Organise your menus to present a small number of important logical destinations that visitors will likely choose often