.Control Your Google Sitelinks with Google Webmaster Tools
Google Sitelinks are the sublinks that appear under your domain in Google search results when they feel your site highly trafficked and a very precise match for the user’s query.
In our case this predominantly happens when someone searches on ‘Dogster’ or ‘Catster’. It may seem trivial, but since they are each respectively the most common search term leading to our sites, it’s rather important.
Dogster’s Sitelinks on November 9th, 2007
(As you can see, some of these Sitelinks are not helpful to any searcher)
Sitelinks give the searcher deep links into your site if they have an idea of what they are looking for. The Google bot picks what it thinks are the most important links, but it rarely gets it entirely right, so it’s important to check yours regularly and cull it. Note how Dogster and Catster (see below) don’t even have the same Sitelinks even though the homepages have very similar templates. Often it’s just not possible for the Googlebot to know what is the most important or what page’s title make no sense to a new visitor.
Hiten had creatively advised us previously to add any files we don’t want appearing in the Sitelinks to our robots.txt. It took a couple weeks, but the links eventually got cycled out. However, that also meant that those links would never come up even if explicitly searc hed for.
Now thanks to a link in a comment in a Gooruze answer I was directed to by Clay from Minti, I see Google has finally created a tool to let you explicitly block a link from being a Sitelink without having to have it removed from the search results altogether.
To view and manage your Sitelinks, go to the Google Webmaster Tools and click your site(s). In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks. If you’re not using Google Webmaster Tools, and care about inbound Google traffic get on it. They provide some decent (but not extensive) views into how the Googlebot is crawling your site
Catster’s Sitelinks on November 9th, 2007
Now I’m off to block some of the Catster Sitelinks.
Related Entries:
Master Your Google Analytic Stats with Filters
Google Keeps Loosing Our ‘Dog’
This is a really great informative post. Thanks for posting it.
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