How to get nicely presented Google results?

[markchicobaby]

There is a site (that shall remain nameless on this forum!) called www.thesite.com.

When I Google it, the Google results page gives a nicely laid out presentation of the site's sections, with links to each section, like this:

[U]Sitename - Your guide to blah blah[/U]
Welcome to Sitename, blah blah...
www.sitename.com/ - 32k - [U]Cached[/U] - [U]Similar Pages[/U]
   [U]Section1[/U]   [U]Section4[/U]
   [U]Section2[/U]   [U]Section5[/U]
   [U]Section3[/U]   [U]Section6[/U]

How do I achieve this for my site? Is it something on their site?

Also, they appear to be missing a robots.txt.
www.thesite.com/robots.txt yields 404 doc not found.

I thought a robots.txt would be mandatory for a site like this (its a major site).

Thanks any advice!

[Dani]

A robots.txt file is used to specify sections of a site that the webmaster wants to exclude from a search engine's index. If there's nothing you want to exclude, you don't need a robots.txt. If part of your site is behind a login, I would recommend using a robots.txt on any pages where googlebot will just get a generic error message.

What your'e describing is called Sitelinks. They are automatically generated by Google and you have no say in what sections appear, even for your own site.

If you sign into Google Webmaster Tools (www.google.com/webmasters/) then you can see which, if any, SiteLinks are generated for your site, and you can choose to remove certain autogenerated SiteLinks from the list. However, there's no way to specify which ones to include.

[Saschaeh]

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-sitelinks-and-brand-domination-through-keyword-ownership
This is a good article about just this topic.

And check this out!: http://www.google.co.za/search?q=lastminute.co.uk&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

All the best!
Sascha

[gcs584]

To be even considered, your site's pages should have sensible titles specified in the title tag of the html - at least in my experience. This means NO keyword stuffing!

As has been suggested, this is not the only requirement or characteristic taken into consideration

[seotogo]

In order for sitelinks to be included your website needs to be number one in the Google rankings, been around a couple of years and be considered the authority in its industry.

[gcs584]

That is incorrect, it does not need to be number one.

A site I run is not by any means number one, and it displays sitelinks.

[seotogo]

That is incorrect, it does not need to be number one.

A site I run is not by any means number one, and it displays sitelinks.

I would like to see this. Can you show me an example?

[gcs584]

An example is provided in the first site located in the top of my signature.

We try market for the terms "automatic garage doors" and "garage doors". In the case of both of those terms, you will find that we are not first or anywhere close.

[markchicobaby]

That is incorrect, it does not need to be number one.

A site I run is not by any means number one, and it displays sitelinks.

I Googled "camber garage doors uk" You came up number one, with no site links.

Are you sure your site gets site links? Here is a screenshot of you at number one with no site links.

[seotogo]

An example is provided in the first site located in the top of my signature.

We try market for the terms "automatic garage doors" and "garage doors". In the case of both of those terms, you will find that we are not first or anywhere close.

I just did a search on google.co.uk and I'm not seeing any sitelinks either. All I'm seeing is one listing on the frontpage for the first term and on the second page for the second term.

[Dani]

DaniWeb has sitelinks only when I search specifically for "daniweb". If I search for "it discussion community", which is almost exclusively DaniWeb results, no sitelinks.

[seotogo]

Yes, I’m mostly seeing sitelinks for proper names (such as DMOZ), which is the name of the website and not so much for generic terms. One except would be for the search “hydrogen cars” which is both a generic term and part of the name of the website.

[Dani]

Yeah ... I usually see them just for proper names too, but I found it odd that they wouldn't appear for "IT discussion community" since you'd be hard pressed to find a single result that isn't related to DaniWeb. I'm surprised their algorithm is able to distinguish since both terms "daniweb" and "it discussion community" are part of our page title, and we rank equally well for both terms.

[seotogo]

It may be that the words in the URL are important, since I'm not seeing seeing sites without the the words in the URL have sitelinks.

[gcs584]

Search for the term "Camber Garage Doors" in google and it will print out site links...at least it does for me. I have made a screenshot available.

Regards,

GCS584

[seotogo]

Okay I see it now. I see that your website ranks number one with sitelinks using the same words in your URL. This is consistent with what I’ve seen from other websites.

[markchicobaby]

Very interesting. "camber garage doors" gives sitelinks, but "camber garage doors uk" doesn't.

It appears the sitelinks are only presented when there is a very close match between what the searcher is looking for and the actual site.

Sitelinks are only being presented when there is almost no ambiguity about which site the searcher wants.

IMO I think this means Google is taking advantage of the fact that many people type the intended sitename into the Google search bar, not the browser address bar.

Presenting sitelinks to these people makes Google even more convenient, so it encourages them to use Google again in future.

This works on all the sites I've tried so far. All these searches present sitelinks:
yahoo
dani web
camber garage doors
the age
the economist
asx (For www.asx.com.au)

Its uncanny how reliably sitelinks will be presented, if you search in this way!

Also, I've noticed that if the domain is several compound words, Google will not present sitelinks; eg, "cambergaragedoors" no sitelinks, but "camber garage doors" gives sitelinks. However the short two word examples above like "daniweb" or "theage" get the sitelinks regardless of whether the words are run together or not. ("dani web" gets sitelinks and so does "daniweb")

I'm guessing there is too much processing (and possibility for errors) to parse longer strings into separate words, so Google are only doing it for shorter domain names. It still presents the same site at number 1, but the sitelinks index must still be separate from the main Google index, so they don't present sitelinks for that site (yet). I'm fairly sure they will be merging the indexes as its such a useful feature, but they probably are not ready to do it yet.

I'll bet for the moment there is a domain name length at which Sitelinks turn off. Hmmmm implications for buyers of domain names, shorter is better (but we knew that anyway...).

M

[gcs584]

Yeah, I reckon your analysis is quite correct. Interestingly, I found this domain in an article:

http://www.thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com/

When you 'explode' or 'tokenize' the string into valid words and punch it into Google, the search engine does NOT return SiteLinks - this could be due to the site not being deemed highly "worthy".

[selfhelpebooks]

Those perks are usually for the big gorilla sites. I would think those sites are there for 5-10 years and have excellent rankings/PR. Won't stop us from trying too, eh ;).

[gcs584]

Well, if it makes you feel any better, Camber Garage Doors has only been running for less than 2 years ;)