Sitelinks are no longer an indication of trust
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.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
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Would have been great if you provide any instances or examples about it.
Offline since 6 months and still holding sitelinks, cant be believeable.
I don’t want to “out” sites that don’t deserve sitelinks but the fact a load of sites have got them recently is public knowledge.
I was wondering what was happening when just about everyone was getting sitelinks.
I know trust is huge for Google, but I never connected sitelinks with trust. It was my impression (and of course I can’t come up with any specific examples now) that sitelinks appeared when Google felt that you were far and away the #1 site for that search term. Obviously in many cases that implied a significant level of trust (e.g. a search for “nursing jobs”), but in some cases it was just because the search term was so unique that one site clearly matched it better than all others, regardless of trust level (“shoemoney” comes to mind).
Now they have definitely expanded the number of searches for which they show sitelinks, but I don’t know that that’s an indication that they have waived the trust component. The new sites I’ve seen with sitelinks are all highly trusted.
But the google customer still believes it is an authority website…
how does one get sitelinks?
Sitelinks created automatically by an algorithm. Google says they “analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts.”
I guess none of you read this patent, right?
I’ve read it.
Yes, I haven’t ever connected sitelinks with trust either. But I do think that commanding a larger area of the search results page should translate into greater traffic… So I’ve been obsessed with them for quite some time.
…And uh… I’m still waiting for mine.
I am adding a comment after so many months. I have noticed that if a site is down for some reason which previously had a sitelink, when it comes back online, it loses the sitelink for some time. This reinforces the theory that Google still assigns “trust” value to sites which it has enabled sitelinks.
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December 5, 2009 at 7:18pm