So, Google sitelinks, authority site, or not?

.We’ve seen this discussion on several forums over the last few months, and sometimes it gets quite heated, regarding Sitelinks, “authority sites”, and the possible connection/s between the two things.

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Google’s official stance on sitelinks is:

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The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user.

If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don’t think that the sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

Lots have people have taken this statement by Google as the entire story, seemingly to imply that there can be nothing more to the story, but we’re not quite so sure.

Our site first started showing them at 8.5 months old, for just the one term “SEO Ibiza” which yes, is of course our company name, but is also two separate keywords. Interestingly though (above) we also had them from the start for “SEO in Ibiza” too.

Since then however, the amount of sitelinks has grown steadily, and they’ve switched around a few times, swapping one or two different pages in and out of the selection, but now seems to have settled at the seven that currently show in the shot above..

So lets take a closer look at our current sitelink pages characteristics..

• 6 out of 7 pages are PR4. Malta is PR3, Tools alternates between PR4 & greybar.
• 3 out of 4 “geo” sitelinks (Mallorca, Malta, Ibiza) are dominant Google #1′s
• 6 out of 7 of these pages are header linked, only Packages is in the main Nav
• Traffic stats show only Blog HQ could be considered a “most visited” page.

It’s almost like there are some general trends amongst them, but each with it’s own exception to the rule? And then there have been 3 other pages that have swapped in and out of the sitelink control panel in WMT, and interestingly these all share some similar traits.

All of them alternate between PR4 and greybar, all of them are low traffic, and all of them don’t rank in the top 20 for their main phrases yet.

Of the three, 2 are Blog HQ pages, “Alliances” & “International” - which are one directory further in, i.e…  .com/blog/alliances plus 1 more main site page: “.com/seo-resources.html“.  All 3 are also text linked from the header, or right-hand sidebar which the template CSS makes the spiders read first.

Of the other surmised factors affecting sitelinks

• Site ranks first for the keyword(s) that generate the Sitelinks listing YES
• Easily spiderable, structured navigation YES
• Fairly high natural search traffic NOT ALL PAGES
• High click through rates from the search results page UNKNOWN
• Useful outbound links NOT ALL PAGES
• Inbound links from high quality sites NOT ALL PAGES
• Site age is several years or older NO

One of the things the the “no authority” camp say, is that any site can get these entrance level type sitelinks  “for-your-name” and it’s no indication of any kind of authority status.

But surely this is still an indication of a measure of authority for that particular term?

If you are that company, and there are no others with that name, or, there are several others but you are dominant (sitelinks) then your site is the authoritative result (at that time) for that term?

And then what about when you reverse the keywords, in our case “Ibiza SEO” ? (yep, still there, on.com anyway) – so this is now clearly keywords, and not just company name anymore?

And then more variations on the theme, keywords reversed, + “company”

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and below, Keywords reversed, + Tools ..

These have clearly progressed on from being “domain name” sitelinks and are dominant #1′s on those keyword terms (even though of course these are not high competition keywords)

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And, as we also always say in these discussions, several of our larger (and older) client sites also have sitelinks for major league competitive keywords, that are also not in their domain names. In these instances we can’t help thinking that the fact that a site has sitelinks on non-domain-related ($4 per click on Adwords) buying keywords, does indicate somewhat of an authoritative status on those keywords at least.

keyword authority status  …if you will…

But we do also agree that this is still not the mythical “authority site” itself, whatever that may actually be – that’s still really a title reserved for the few Wiki’s of this world.

But the whole discussion is a little confused in our opinion anyway, as since when does Google work on a site basis anyway? It’s Pagerank is it not? – Google ranks pages, not sites, so we should probably be talking about “authority page” status instead of “authority site” status anyway, no?

In conclusion we think that whether Google publicly admits it or not:

sitelinks = serp dominance = keyword authority

What do you think about this?