How are these links being displayed?
-
How does one markup their site to get the small sitelinks to appear in SERP listings as seen in the example image below?
-
You'd use alt text on an image link, but not text. Alt text is the text that would display instead of the image if the image isn't shown for whatever reason (e.g. for the visually impaired or for those who prefer to browse text-only). Title text is the text that displays when you hover over something. You can use it in addition to the alt text, but it would be the title that displays when you hover over the image.
I'm sure all three (alt, title and anchor text) help Google to learn what a link is all about.
-
They actually specifically refer to it as "alt" in this help file:
-
I'm sure there are a few little bits and bobs that could help to encourage which pages to show as sitelinks in Google. Do you mean title text instead of alt text (the text that shows when you hover over a link)? Adding that, as well as having your main links in the website's main navigation and these pages being higher in the site structure would probably help. (But, from my experience, lack of title text for the link wouldn't prevent Google from showing the page as a sitelink) But really, with a little bit of time and patience (and everything else), they should start showing naturally regardless.
Good luck!
-
Thank you, Ria! I do notice in the Search Console help files it does mention something about tagging internal links with alt text (along with good anchor text) as a way to better optimize these links. I wonder based on that suggestion that only links that have alt text would even be considered for sitelinks? It's especially peculiar as alt isn't even a recognized attribute by the W3C standards...
Nevertheless, thank you for your response - I've found in my additional research that simply adhering the SEO best practices (along with longer standing high rankings) are the best formula for getting these sitelinks.
-
Unfortunately, there is no way to mark up your website to display sitelinks in search results. Google will only display them for reputable websites if they think that these additional links to pages within your website are useful to the user's search query. Can't really do anything else, I'm afraid. Apart from demote pages in Search Console that you don't want to appear as a sitelink. Other than that, sitelinks are a little out of our control....
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Thousands of external links
My site has supposedly over 4,000 external links from it. Is there a good piece of software that could scrape my site that tell me from which page all the links originate from and where they're all going? I'm surprised that the number is this high because our entire site is only a few hundred pages. Here's the site XXXkidecalsXXX.com (just remove the XXX for the URL.) If you want to weigh in on any other issues you see with the site, I'd be happy for any suggestions in general.
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Page for Link Building
Hello Guys, My question is about a link building process. We all know that some directories/sites do require a reciprocal link. Does it make any sense to creat a page in website exclusively to reciprocal links? And what we do with this webpage in terms of indexing, do folow, crawling...etc. Any sugestions are more then welcome 🙂 Tks in advance! PP
Technical SEO | | PedroM0 -
Self-referencing links
I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself. Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.
Technical SEO | | IPROdigital0 -
Forms and link juice
On product listing page on e-commerce site We use POST forms as 'Add To Cart' buttons. Because of that We have dozens (~40-80) forms on any product listing page, and two questions regarding them: Does these forms affect link juice of other links on the page? Are there cases when forms are somehow counted by Google as links? Regards, Lucek
Technical SEO | | lucek0 -
Persistent Unnatural Links in Webmaster tools
We recently were notified about unnatural links from two websites (totalling a few thousands links each). We went to the websites and asked them to remove the links, which they apparently did. After this we applied for reconsideration to Google, explaining the situation, however they came back and said we still have links. We noticed there were still links, however there were less than before, and so we once again asked the sites to remove all the links. Now we are sure all the links are gone as when we click a random link and view the page source there is no reference to our site, however WebMaster tools is not updating the link list, claiming we still have thousands of links. Do we have to apply for another reconsideration request to get them to re-crawl the sites to get rid of the links, or should it happen automatically?
Technical SEO | | eXia0 -
Link Detox
Hey guys, I'm currently working on cleaning up our link profile and have been looking at several tools. Has any one used this from http://www.linkresearchtools.com do you think its worth investing in? Matthew
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
Remove Bad Links Or Build New
Hello, After deeply assessing our back links we have come to the conclusion that we have too many links that have been devalued and also some spammy looking links.... Our next question is do we remove these bad links and start a fresh or do we just build new white hat links?? Thanks, Scott
Technical SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0 -
Internal Links on eCommerce sites
I have been working on an eCommerce site; www.pretavoir.co.uk over the past year. Improvements in SERPs have been good with many top three positions. However, there are other important keywords of similar difficulty which refuse to behave in a similar way.... The site is PR4 and has a homepage PA 52. The homepage includes links to internal brand pages eg Prada, Gucci etc. Q Would it be worthwhile creating footer anchor text with eaxct text eg Prada sunglasses, Gucci Sunglasses?? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0