How to get sitelinks in Google search results

Google’s definition is that sitelinks are links from the same domain, clustered together under a text result. A searcher sees the main result and, beneath it, direct links to pages such as services, prices or contact.

Google says it shows sitelinks only when it thinks they will be useful to the searcher. If a site’s structure does not let its systems find good sitelinks, or the links are not relevant to the search, none are shown.

Google’s documentation says that, at the moment, sitelinks are automated. No field in Search Console and no markup on the page asks for them. Anyone offering to add sitelinks to a result is offering to improve the structure Google reads, which is the only route.

Google lists five practices.

• Page titles and headings that are informative, relevant and compact.
• A logical site structure that is easy to navigate.
• Links to important pages from other relevant pages.
• Internal link text that is concise and relevant.
• No repetition of the same content across pages.

Three checks cover most of it.

1. Every main page has its own title and one main heading, and the two agree.
2. The main pages are linked from the navigation on every page, with the same short wording each time.
3. No two pages compete for the same subject.

Our guide to writing title tags and meta descriptions covers the first, and what a technical SEO audit covers shows how structure is checked.

Google’s advice for an unwanted sitelink is to remove the page from the site or to add a noindex tag to it. Both take the page out of Google’s results entirely, so use them only for a page that should not be found at all.

Sitelinks are one of five parts of a result that a site can influence. Our guide to changing how your website appears on Google covers the title, the description, the site name and the icon.