How to get sitelinks

As a site owner, you want to come across as an authoritative result, as well as stand out in the search results. Even if you’re already ranking #1. Sitelinks can help you with that. What are sitelinks, you ask? Sitelinks appear under the main search result, highlighting subpages of a website in a menu-like structure. They often appear for specific brand searches.

Let’s take a look at what those sitelinks look like:

As you’ll understand, sitelinks can push down the pages of your competitors on the results pages, and provide potential visitors more options to navigate to your site and find what they’re looking for. Of course, this could be beneficial to your traffic.

You’ve probably seen sitelinks in the search result pages at some point, but how do you get Google to add them to your site? As it happens, getting sitelinks isn’t for just anyone, unfortunately. Neither can you influence which links appear as sitelinks. In this Ask Yoast, we’ll go into this some more!

Sergiu Tere sent us this question:

I see that some sites have sitelinks, but not from Google AdWords. How do they do that?

Watch the video or read the transcript for my answer!

Getting sitelinks

Well, it’s very easy. Sitelinks are given to you. It’s not something that you can put in somewhere. Google will give you site links if it thinks you are very ‘authoritative’ for that query, so if you’re a very important result for that query. In that case, it will add site links from your site, based on how people browse your site and how they use your site.

So, it’s not something that you can change; it’s not something that you can opt-in for, it’s not something that you can do specific SEO for. You just have to become very important for that specific query.
Good luck!

Read more: Google’s sitelinks searchbox & Yoast »

Ask Yoast series