Simple best practice for sitelink titles

Sitelink titles (anchor text) can be influenced by your webmaster charms! The URLs that Google selects for sitelinks, however, are far less manually manipulated.

 

google sitelinks for oprah.com

Oprah’s sitelink titles include “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “Contact Us,” “Why Oprah Says She’ll Never Diet…”

 

If the titles of your sitelinks aren’t exactly what you hoped for, a troubleshooting tactic is to investigate the anchor text of your internal links (as it’s one of several factors used to determine sitelink titles). For example, here are a few links on Oprah’s homepage:

 

Text link <a href="http://www.oprah.com/omagazine.html">O, The Oprah Magazine</a>
Link to a CSS sprite (so it’s a less common case, but you get the idea) <a class="bookclub" href="http://www.oprah.com/book_club.html" alt="BOOK CLUB">BOOK CLUB</a>

 

Let's pretend Oprah sees her sitelink "BOOK CLUB," but she would prefer it displayed with standard capitalization as "Book Club". One way to help influence this change is for Oprah (or a web-savvy Stedman) to check the anchor text of her internal links and the alt text of her image links -- making sure to use "Book Club," not "BOOK CLUB."

 

We recently updated our sitelinks FAQ to reflect this tip (thanks to the Sitelinks teams for all their help!):

 

[ At the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. We're always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future. There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition. Read a blog post about the importance of link structure. ]

 

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