Sitelinks (the collection of links that are highlighted red in the screenshot below) have long been associated with having trusted status in Google and were a good indicator that the site was a reputable place to get a link from.
Over the past 6 months Google has been rolling out sitelinks to almost every website under the sun and suddenly the fact a site has sitelinks is no longer an indication that they are a trusted site. In the last few weeks I’ve seen sites that have been offline for 6 months with only a handful of low quality backlinks being given sitelinks.
Obviously there are very few trusted sites that don’t have sitelinks (and this is probably due to poor site structure) but don’t be fooled into thinking that just because a site has sitelinks it is a well trusted site.
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