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by Montreal's SEO specialist, Gabriel Goldenberg aka Bookworm-SEO.

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Monday, October 22, 2007

Get Google Sitelinks Research Project Part 1

Google attributes certain websites "Sitelinks" and at the SEW forums, I found an interesting discussion on what it is that causes this. It's all speculation though, so I've decided to start a research project on what factors in Google's data/algorithms might cause these Sitelinks to appear.

The first thing I've done has been to establish a methodology of possible factors to test for. Second, I've created a sample set of 100 sites that have Sitelinks. Here is the list of sitelinked sites:

Atu2
Kidsastronomy
General Motors
McGill
University of Toronto
Kraft
Omniture
Insurance.com
Sierra Club
MSN
Yahoo
Goog
SEW
SEL
SEObook
SEOmoz
Squidoo
TD Canada Trust
Parliament
DoubleClick
24/7 Real Media
Loblaws
Xbox360 Forum
Loreal
KidsDinos
Biology4kids
CoolMath4Kids
Genealogy.com
Ancestry.com
PlentyofFish
Problogger
Vistaprint
Logos.it
Blue Host
Hostgator
Mortgage101
Tiger Direct
Law.com
Microsoft
Adobe
PlanetPhotoshop
W3C
ScienceMag
Journal of Medicine
Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Biological Chemistry
American Bar Association
Beckett
Alibris
Digg
Stumble Upon
Media.com
Fox TV
Canada.com
Conservative Party of Canada
Liberal Party of Canada
Green Party of Canada
Food Network
Scholarships Canada
Standford newspaper
London England – VisitLondon.com comes up below news results and below Maps results with Sitelinks.
Toronto Canada – Toronto.ca below maps
CollegeHumor
Download.com
IGN.com
Counter-scipt.net – Counter-strike scripts
Feedreader.com
Newsgator
CTV – CTV.ca comes up after a futher query link to Google finance and stock info
TSX.com for Stock
Berkshire Hathaway
Mohawk College – Mohawk
How Stuff Works
Kids Health
Victoria’s Secret
Myspace
Alexa
Facebook
LinkedIn
Technorati
Sitepoint
DigitalPoint
V7n
Compete
Bargain.com
HaAretz
Yediot Ahronot
Pajamas Media
Vertrue
Consumer Reports
Shareasale
CJ.com
Namepros
Olive Garden
Gardeners – Garden Supply
Shoppers drug mart (but not Pharmaprix)
Creditcards.com
ISEdb
Pandia
WebProNews

It's a pretty prestigious group, I think we can agree. I'll be conducting tests over the next weeks and months to figure out what the Sitelinks attribution factors are. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, try typing in the name of your favourite site into your Firefox address bar. You'll find that those sites that have sitelinks will see their site show up right away; some others will return a Google results page (there's a grey area where sites have no sitelinks but they do get returned automatically in Firefox.

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Labels: Google, Sitelinks

Get Google Sitelinks Research Project Part 1 posted by Bookworm SEO @ 9:51 PM

3 Comments on this SEO article:

At 3:36 AM, Tom Critchlow said…

Interesting idea - it would be great if you could actually come up with something conclusive out of this.

Care to share exactly what you'll be testing for?
At 6:25 PM, Unknown said…

Hi,
I'm a Japanese webmaster.
I'm very interested in your project.

Vanessa Fox, ex-worker for Google has revealed some of mechanism of Sitelinks on her blog.

Read the post if you don't know it yet, please.

http://www.vanessafoxnude.com/2007/10/18/google-webmaster-central-sitelinks-historical-query-stats-and-surprises/

--
Kenichi Suzuki
http://www.suzukikenichi.com/blog/
At 2:35 PM, Bookworm SEO said…

Tom, I'll be posting the factors for testing within a week or two. I'd love to have you participate.

Kenichi, I appreciate you sharing that link. I hadn't seen it before and I'll have to go read it now!

Thankyou for leaving feedback you two :).

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