Question

How do you create the special links which show under sites in search results? Say I search for Stack Overflow at Google, I get a result close to this:

The links I am asking about are outlined in red in the image above. What do you put in your page to have them show in search results, or how are they created?

Thank you,

Brett

Answer 1

They’re called Sitelinks. This is what Google itself says about them: How does Google compile the list of links shown below some search results?

Also have a look at Matt Cutts’ short presentation about the anatomy of a search result.

Vanessa Fox provides the most detail about how they work and what you can do to influence them.

Summarizing mainly from Vanessa Fox’s blog post:

Google auto-generates them, based largely on easy-to-crawl, relevant, internal links with short titles on your site’s homepage. They’ll only appear on the first search result, and only when Google thinks they’re useful. There can be up to 8 sitelinks.

As the Google support page also says, you can view them for your site in their Webmaster Tools and block those ones you don’t like. You can’t add any yourself.

A recent Webmaster Central blog post adds that a single row of up to 4 sitelinks can appear on more results than just the first one now.