New Google Site Links Dominate Search Page

If you're a regular user of Google, (and these days, who isn't?), you might have noticed that what were once very small and unobtrusive extra links below some search engine results have now become big, full-sized additional links below some search engine results. These additional links are called site links, and they're a way for Google to provide extra options for people to find things on your site.

Site Links Well Established

Google first launched their site links back in 2006, but they were quite subtle, sometimes only appearing for pages that had tables of contents, and anchors to allow users to jump to specific places on a page. Over time, these evolved into proper links for other pages on the site, but they were always small and out of the way.

Google Site Links Updated

A couple of days ago though, Google gave their site links a facelift, making them the same size as normal links. Now that site links are as large as other links, and any given search result can have up to 8 secondary links appearing below their main search engine result, the first page has suddenly got a lot bigger. Which means that appearing near the top, with site links, can push other results well below the fold, just like the now dominating local results can. For those sites that are near the top, this could be great news. For the others, not so much.

How To Display Site Links

The short answer is that you can't. Site links are something that Google determines automatically, based on whether they think they'll be relevant to the search, and importantly, whether your site structure and navigation allows them to easily crawl your site in order to determine what site links should be. Site owners do have a modicum of control, in that Google will let you specify links that shouldn't be used as site links for search results, but even there, they don't guarantee that it won't happen, because it's an algorithm that does it. You can find out how to demote site links in their webmaster tools help, here. In the meanwhile, if you want site links to display for your site, all you can do is make sure your URL structure and navigation is logical, crawlable and user friendly, and keep your page content unique and relevant on every page.