Google announced today that it is launching an update to its sitelinks feature in search results. These are the links that appear under some search results that point users to different parts of that that site.
Now, sitelinks are full-sized blue text links with a URL and a single line of text underneath. There are also more of them. The old maximum number was 8. Now it’s 12.
But that’s not all. How Google actually determines which links to show has also changed.
“In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links,” explains Daniel Rocha, a software engineer on Google’s sitelinks team. “This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page.”
“Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them,” he adds. “The number of sitelinks will also vary based on your query.”
While some users may have seen this feature in tests prior to this point, Google says it is rolling out the updates over the next few days around the globe in all supported languages to modern browser users (Chrome, Firefox, IE7 and above, etc.).