Google Sitelinks- Do they or Do they Not Affect Search Rankings?

Google Sitelinks are primarily the links that are usually placed under a search result. These links can number anywhere between 4 and 8 as sub-links.

Over at the Webmaster World, there is a thread that is discussing the importance of sitelinks. Here are a few posts from that thread:

"Recently we had a Google site link change for our home page and we noticed a big dip in the serps. Google did not properly title the site link as it did in the past, so I went into webmaster tools and blocked the site link. When it asked me for a reason, I simply put that the page had the wrong title and put the correct title in.

It does look like they've done some updating recently – they just this past weekend added a sitelink to the most important event on my events site. Too bad the event was over two weeks ago. Be interesting to see if the link disappears now, since people won't be searching for it again until next year."

Well, here are the main points that came out of the entire discussion:

• Sitelinks do not directly influence your search rankings.
• Sitelinks can be removed but not changed via Webmaster Tools.
• Sitelinks appear to be constructed based on your site architecture, as Google understands it.
• Sitelinks can strongly influence your click-through rate on your search result listing.
• Sitelinks, when removed, can be gone as long as a year or more.

How Sitelinks affect your website, is explained in much more detail at Google Groups:

"Recently we had a Google site link change for our home page and we noticed a big dip in the serps. Google did not properly title the site link as it did in the past, so I went into webmaster tools and blocked the site link. When it asked me for a reason, I simply put that the
page had the wrong title and put the correct title in.

This, Googler Jonathan Simon replied, "Any Sitelinks you blocked should be removed from the search results soon if they haven't been already. Although we don't take action on Sitelinks feedback for a specific site, your feedback is appreciated and used along with the feedback of other Webmaster Tools users to find and fix issues with the overall system that auto generates Sitelinks. You can review your Sitelinks periodically in Webmaster Tools to see if new Sitelinks have been generated. "

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!