Having a basic understanding of how Google sitelinks are generated, my previous conclusions seem to jive with the many Google sitelinks sites I have visited over the past few days. It really depends on user interaction on your site based on the set search queries. Which means the keywords for which you rank must relevant to your site, and should encourage users to navigate though the same pages as the previous users, over and over again.

Many webmasters in my opinion, should be tempted to rethink their webmastering for a number of sundry reasons in light of the possibility of Google sitelinks. SEOs have a prime opportunity here to illustrate the importance of Google sitelinks to their clients, and to encourage companies to optimize for sitelinks. Even though sitelinks are entirely up to the amount RELEVANT traffic your site can attract, there are many on-site issues that may stand in the way of getting these sitelinks. The very obvious benefits of these sitelinks especially when returning the search for the company name are clear and real, and even the least web-savvy individual must know the power of these.

I am just surmising here as it is still too soon to be able to reveal the true nature of these sitelinks, I have come to few logical conclusions.

The ever present ASP problem

ASP, a dynamic programming language, is much more difficult to optimize than normal html. This because many developers don’t realize that URLs littered with many parameters, or worse the same URL for each page, postbacks instead of actual links, can all cause major problems in the search engines. Hopefully the new book SEO for ASP will get more developers interested in what they can do to enhance search engine rankings, but in the meantime, ASP sites might have a much harder time obtaining the sitelinks they might truly deserve.

For example, take a dynamic ASP site that presents different content for the same URL. This is usually all the home page of the domain, so this will be a site where each page is at domain.com, and there is no page name. This means that the search engines only crawl one page, and only recognize one page. See the problem? You can’t have sitelinks because you don’t have any sitelinks. You have one page. Or, on the other hand, your links are set as postbacks. Meaning the search engine cannot crawl your links, and you have no anchor text for your links. This means that you would not have any text to present for your sitelinks.

Images as links with no ALT text

I have noticed that the text displayed in Google sitelinks comes not from the head title of the page, but from the text from the links on the other pages on the site that link to it. While using images is fine, here is one more reason to make sure that the images on your site have ALT attributes. Because search engine spiders can’t read what the image says. This might pose a problem again with the text that is presented for the Google sitelinks.

One more reason for flat site architecture

If you don’t link to all the important pages on each page, and ensure that all pages are only a few links from the page, then you are running the chance that fewer pages will be visited with frequency. You want each user to view each of your important pages, so here is one more reason to make sure that they do.

These are all very important regardless of sitelinks, but I could see these particular website structure choices getting in the way of even the highest traffic sites getting sitelinks.

I am going to try to get 3 sitelinks. That is my goal for the next 6 months. I will have to get a lot of traffic very fast and keep it, and that is a long shot but I am going to try. I have some ideas for marketing my blog offline that I am extremely excited about, and it just might work!