Sitelink is one kind of auto-generated sub listing, and Breadcrumbs work as a secondary navigation aid. Here I’m discussing how to get Sitelinks and Breadcrumbs in Google search.
Sitelinks
Include up to eight additional links to your most important pages. They add more space to your search result and allow users to go straight to deeper content.
You cannot choose the sitelinks you would like listed, but you can check if Google is displaying sitelinks through Google Webmaster Tools and block the pages you don’t want to be listed.
Google States:
“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.”
Some Factors Can Influence Your Chances of Gaining Sitelinks:
- Improve navigation – Google uses an algorithm to decide which of your pages should be included as sitelinks, based on your sites navigation and popularity of pages. Use HTML instead of images (unless alt text included so Google can categorize your links, but even so it doesn’t look great, so avoid), Flash or JavaScript ie. make sure content is easily spiderable
- Rankings – Your site ranks in the number one position for the keyword searched for. Sitelinks apply only to limited search phrases, so aim to optimize your most important pages fully
- Results – Your site has high conversions, PageRank, traffic, and CTR. All indicators of a popular site
- Authority – Good outbound and inbound links
- Age – Need a good few years under your belt to be applicable. Sites less than a year old will be least likely to gain sitelinks.
- Sitemap – Make sure you have submitted one; you won’t be applicable without one.
- Hygiene – No broken links or 404 errors
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation, e.g. Home Page > Gas > Buy Gas, and are displayed in search results. Getting your breadcrumbs in the SERP means you have more links on the results page (you have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail).
From the users’ perspective, it shows them where they are going and the context. It also gives them a greater choice.
Some Factors Can Influence Your Chances of Gaining Breadcrumbs (in the search results):
- Use breadcrumbs on your site and make sure they are consistent with your site’s navigation. You must have a set of delimited links on your website that reflects your site’s hierarchy (there is some debate over whether this is needed, but breadcrumbs are good from a usability and SEO point of view anyway)
- Make sure your HTML code is easily parseable. Google recommends looking at the code used by sites that do have breadcrumbs and trying to copy their code as closely as possible to make sure that Google’s web crawler can understand it
- Use a “>” as the delimiter because it’s what Google uses (although it has not been confirmed using other symbols will hinder anything)
- Have a clean URL structure
- Do not nofollow internal links, especially those on your navigation
- Put the breadcrumbs in a paragraph element instead of a list, or a div, just so you clearly flag that it’s a breadcrumb
Google States You May Not See Results Due to The Following Factors –
- Google does not trust your domain
- It takes time, may take a while before your results
- Improper markup
So, follow these effective steps and increase chance to gain sitelinks and breadcrumbs, you must have to avoid google stated factors.
