Sitelinks can appear below your main page in search results. They help users discover more content, serving as navigational shortcuts.
Sitelinks improve SEO by expanding your listing beyond the basic result, boosting clickthrough rates.
In the past, Google Search Console could be used to demote pages from being considered here.
Though sitelinks are now automated, these 3 steps will encourage the best pages & displays for them:
1. Internal links or headers from pages, leading to popular or new content, are shown. Especially alongside Google’s recent title update, make sure you evaluate anchor text & headers for your key pages.
2. If you insert a Table of Contents, with jump links to each header on your page, then sitelinks will often appear for blogs.
3. For the homepage, these are usually pulled from the navigation menu.
Here’s an extra tip for homepage sitelinks: ensure your homepage’s navigation menu links to actual pages instead of showing text only. For example, a company may have a Services dropdown, which then expands to show pages describing each service.
In this case, Services itself is not a page but just plain text for a dropdown to display the specific pages. This is a mistake; you should create a Services hub page with unique content that links to the child pages as well. Otherwise, the anchor text may lead to a subpage, creating a poor user experience.