Google Sitelinks and how do I choose them?

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Google Sitelinks - What are they?

Added Monday 04/08/2008

Every now and again you may see links underneath the first result in the Google search results. Google call these "sitelinks" but there is not much more we know about them. What are they and how do you get them.

These links usually only appear when your website "owns" the keywords or brand you are typing in to Google. For an example of what I mean try typing "MSN" (link). Notice how there are eight "quick links" under the MSN result.

We used to have them for this site until launching our new (award winning) website design about 4 months ago. I was intrigued to see when these would come back and more intrigued to see what Google would deem important enough to allocate a link to.

Finally, quite soon after the page rank update (maybe a correlation there?) I noticed in the Google Webmaster Tools that 8 sitelinks have now been allocated. According to a few blogs it may take a couple of months for these to actually start showing in the search results, watch this space.

Within the Webmaster tools you have the option to block any of the chosen sitelinks if you do not want them to show. I have actually decided to block one link that pointed to a specific website in our portfolio. Its not that I'm not proud of that site, I just dont think its relevant to our prosepcts. Google will then allocate a new link to takes its place.

Other sitelinks Google chose are:
Contact Us
Charity
Development
Online Dating Software
Blog
Case Studies
Consulting

Even though they wouldnt be my first choice I'm going to keep these ones. I think these give a good insight into the broad range of our business and will help potential vistors to the site. However I am slightly bemused as to why one of the links is tagged "Development" rather than "Web Development" and really confused as to why our most popular website section "Web Designers" is not there at all.

The jury is still out as to how Google chooses these links.

Google says they choose links if they "think they'll be useful to the user". How do they determine that?

Some say its to do with website traffic, others say its down to your backlink strategy. All I know for sure is that its not as simple as that. The links show neither our most popular pages or our most linked pages and I have yet to find anything conrete by analyzing the web statistics either.

I would very much link to see "web design" there soon though, after all it's a pretty big part of what we do what we do!