Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitelinks are wrong
-
When I search my website on Google, the sitelinks that I have appear to be wrong. How can I fix this? I have all of my pages optimized.
-
What do you mean by "wrong"? Is Google not showing the site links you want to see? Are they formatted incorrectly? Please explain further or show us an example.
-
You once were able to "demote" certain pages from being listed in Google's sitelinks, but Search Console has since removed this feature. Google's algorithm does its best to cater your sitelinks to the searcher's intent. Check out their update here for some more insight.
I would first ask if you are ranking #1 for your brand name. If not, that's where I would start.
If you are, the next question I'd ask is have you submitted a sitemap to Search Console?
If you have submitted a sitemap, the next step would be to make sure your navigation and content structure is obvious, clear, and well-organized. I would also work to internally (and externally) link to the pages you'd most like to see in your sitelinks. Google will more than likely take this as a signal to know which of your pages are the most important. I'm sure there are many other factors that go into which sitelinks display, but those are the few that you have the most control over, in my opinion.
Hope this helps!
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
-
Ranking #1 in Bing & DuckDuckGo, not at all for Google - where am I going wrong?
According to the Moz rank checking tool, my blog ranks in the top 3 for my name "James Crowley" on Bing, Yahoo (both in the US and UK), and also DuckDuckGo (though Moz can't tell me that). And yet doesn't rank anywhere for Google. I don't have any penalties, and for other keywords it appears fine on Google. Does this seem strange to you? Am I going wrong somewhere? The blog is https://www.jamescrowley.net/. Many thanks James Nq5uF2al.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | james.crowley0 -
If a page ranks in the wrong country and is redirected, does that problem pass to the new page?
Hi guys, I'm having a weird problem: A new multilingual site was launched about 2 months ago. It has correct hreflang tags and Geo targetting in GSC for every language version. We redirected some relevant pages (with good PA) from another website of our client's. It turned out that the pages were not ranking in the correct country markets (for example, the en-gb page ranking in the USA). The pages from our site seem to have the same problem. Do you think they inherited it due to the redirects? Is it possible that Google will sort things out over some time, given the fact that the new pages have correct hreflangs? Is there stuff we could do to help ranking in the correct country markets?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParisChildress1 -
Google Adding Wrong Location to Title Tag on Multi-Branch Business Homepage
We're a business with 5 separate locations across 5 cities in Upstate NY. While doing some visual ad previews in the adwords interface I noticed that Google is altering my title tag and adding the word "Rochester" to the end of it, cutting short my designated title tag. Rochester is the location of our headquarters so not a big deal for 1/5th of our customers. But to my dismay, the same thing is happening when searching from the geo locations of my other branches. So when searching for my business in Buffalo (we have a physical address in Buffalo), the title tag in the results still says our company name and "Rochester". This of course is likely leading to confusion and actively harming our organic CTR in our branch locations. This is happening in all of the remaining 4 branch locations. I'm at a loss, I tried lengthening the title tag but it still gets cut off. The term Rochester appears (as do the other branch locations) in my meta description for the homepage as well as in the text of the page itself. I haven't gone so far as to remove that yet and hopefully don't have to. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Doylejg30 -
Sitelinks to Sister Companies
Hi We have a number of sister companies and link to them via a drop down in the footer - are these links as dangerous as anchor text links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
What would cause the wrong category page to come up?
I am trying to figure out why the wrong thing is coming up in the serps. For example, we are trying to rank for used widgets. But when you type in used widgets in google the primary widget page doesn't come up, one of the secondary categories under used widgets comes up. What would cause this? What are things I should check?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Can't crawl website with Screaming frog... what is wrong?
Hello all - I've just been trying to crawl a site with Screaming Frog and can't get beyond the homepage - have done the usual stuff (turn off JS and so on) and no problems there with nav and so on- the site's other pages have indexed in Google btw. Now I'm wondering whether there's a problem with this robots.txt file, which I think may be auto-generated by Joomla (I'm not familiar with Joomla...) - are there any issues here? [just checked... and there isn't!] If the Joomla site is installed within a folder such as at e.g. www.example.com/joomla/ the robots.txt file MUST be moved to the site root at e.g. www.example.com/robots.txt AND the joomla folder name MUST be prefixed to the disallowed path, e.g. the Disallow rule for the /administrator/ folder MUST be changed to read Disallow: /joomla/administrator/ For more information about the robots.txt standard, see: http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html For syntax checking, see: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml User-agent: *
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart
Disallow: /administrator/
Disallow: /bin/
Disallow: /cache/
Disallow: /cli/
Disallow: /components/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /installation/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /layouts/
Disallow: /libraries/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /modules/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /tmp/0 -
Wrong titles in site links
Hello fellow marketers, I have found this weird thing with our website in the organic results. The sitelinks in the SERP shows wrong written text. As in grammatically incorrect text. My question is where does Google get the text from? It is not the page title as we can see it. kKsFv0X.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | auke18101 -
Why would sitelinks disappear
For over the past month my site has received sitelinks from Google and they have been really helping out. All of a sudden this morning they are gone. We 301'ed and redirected (WBT) another one of our other sites to this one on monday. Could it be Google is just trying to figure out what we are doing? Has anyone else seen sitelinks come and go on their site without any other redirects? I am assuming it is because of my sites combining but wanted to hear if anyone else saw sitelinks come and go on their own. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GeorgeLaRochelle0