Sitelinks-those useful little hyperlinks to subpages of websites that appear within Google listings-are just one of the many welcome enhancements to Google’s search results that are helpful to users as well as beneficial to your search engine optimization and pay-per-click AdWords campaigns.
Lately Google seems to be stepping up the improvements made to its Sitelinks feature, and has started providing Sitelinks related click data to AdWords marketers. The latest enhancement is being able to see “conversions” for Sitelinks as a group, which is a welcome addition! Being able to see clicks and CTR lets marketers know if their Sitelinks are effective. But this new data is not without its drawbacks, which we’ll get to in a bit.
First, let’s take a quick look back at the evolution of Google Sitelinks so we can better understand how they came to be and why they’re an important consideration in your search engine marketing efforts:
2005
Google started experimenting with an enhanced listing in their natural search results.
2006
Sitelinks evolved to a single row with 4 links that were, according to Vanessa Fox Google’s sitemap guru, generated automatically and designed to provide the searcher with more valuable results.
2006 - August 15, 2011
Sitelinks continued to prove their value and Google continued to improve their appearance and quality, although still automated. The links were arranged into columns and the number of links doubled to 8. Algorithm improvements started showing Sitelinks for an increased number of results.
August 16, 2011
New and improved Sitelinks launched this day to include full size links with a URL and one line of text (35 characters max), as well as an additional 4 links added to make a total of 12. According to Google, additional algorithm improvements were also made at this time:
“We’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links. This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page. Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them. The number of sitelinks will also vary based on your query-for example, [museum of art nyc] shows more sitelinks than [the met] because we’re more certain you want results from www.metmuseum.org.”
March 30, 2012
Sitelink conversion data is now available in AdWords, for which we’re grateful. However, because Google doesn’t provide conversion data broken out by individual sitelink, it still doesn’t give marketers the complete picture.
As digital marketers, our wish, like everyone else’s, is to see all of this data by each individual “Sitelink.” But this new data is at least a step in the right direction. With any luck we may be able to see this information sooner than later!
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