Google Oficially Launches “Expanded” Sitelinks.

Posted on August 16, 2011 by David.Berger

As we reported earlier this morning it appeared Google was “testing” expanded sitelinks. Well the joke is on us Google released a statement soon after our post officially announcing the “new and improved sitelinks”.

The number of official links has been expanded from 8 to 12. They have also confirmed the use of descriptions and URLS will be included. It will be interesting to see if they find a way to expand this information. Citing Google’s own example of MOMA below you can clearly see they only allow approximately 33 characters including spaces to describe each page. This is only enough information, in our opinion, to confuse the user. As you can see highlighted in yellow below 4 of the 10 descriptions use the exact same description text which does nothing to describe the page you will find. There are two additional duplicate descriptions highlighted in orange below.  Out of 10 sitelinks we only 6 descriptions of a page are unique. URLS are also shortened to a useless point. Unless the page is in the top level directory and is short… a useful URL will not be presented.

Sitelinks MOMA

Rewriting descriptions to dig right into the content in the first 30 characters may help to display more relevant descriptions. We still feel a “hover to view description or content” feature would better serve these enhanced sitelinks. It seems all Google has managed to do is take up more vertical space on the SERP while offering information of nearly unusable value.

It will be interesting to do a study on paid search CTR increase for keywords with bulky site extension results. We reckon this “less attractive” layout on the number one organic search result (the result which, ahem, happens to be closest to the paid search ads across the top and right side) will likely lead to more paid search clicks as these ads and  sitelink extensions will now look much more tidy and neat.

What are your thoughts on the layout and informative capacity of these sitelinks?

Posted in Industry News, Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment

Google Testing New Sitelinks Format

Posted on August 16, 2011 by David.Berger

Google Testing Expanded Site Links By Adding Descriptions & URLs

This post preceded Google’s Announcement later this day that sitelinks were here to stay…. See our followup post on Google Announcing Sitelinks Update Permanent.

It appears Google is now testing expanded sitelinks extensions for some users and/or websites. In the recent past, Google simply offered a plain text link below a site’s search result to specific “deep” pages within a site. Google attributed these links to sites in a “completely  automated” manner using their algorithms. You can read more about sitelinks, how they are attributed to websites and how to control them in Google Webmaster Tools here.

Now it seems Google is testing an expanded sitelinks format where descriptions of a page are used. See screenshot below:

google new sitelinks format example

SEO Effects of Google’s Expanded Sitelinks

This most certainly lengthens the results page and the descriptions and urls are quite truncated making it a bit of a mess. While the supporting data will take time to collect, our gut reaction tells us the number 1 search result on Google for terms where the number 1 result has extensive sitelinks just got a whole lot more important.

For this particular client, Google’s  “old sitelinks format” took up 200 pixels of vertical space. The “new sitelinks” format for this client takes up 400px of space. A typical SERP listing with padding on Google with no sitelinks takes up about 100 pixels of vertical space. Therefore, this new format (when combined with a map listing like this client) knocks the next organic listing two spots downs the page. For a branded/vanity search such as this it’s not as big a deal. But try a Google search for “diapers”. or a few other broad keywords which have single word domains as market leaders and you can see the potential effect it has on stifling competition.

in our opinion this new format certainly crowds the listings while offering little value. The URLS are truncated as are any descriptions. If there were a “magnifying glass” next to each listing to preview the page and/or perhaps preview the SERP listing in its entirety that would seem to make more sense. Controlling your sitelinks now seems to be more important than ever as well as making sure the first few words in your descriptions are relevant and catchy. We can see the potential here and a page preview feature certainly can make getting users to the right page from jumpstreet a better possibility and lower bounce rates. What are your thoughts? Like or Dislike? How can Google improve sitelinks?

Posted in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization | Leave a comment

Fix Live Chat Window Floating Behind Flash Elements

Posted on August 9, 2011 by David.Berger

Recently we had a client add live chat to their website. This not only caused a number of WC3 validation errors but we also noticed the floating widow launched by their software Bold Chat was disappearing behind the flash banners on Internet Explorer browsers such as IE8.

As luck would have it our flash guru was off for the week. After fixing the validation errors the html/css crew set out to resolve this “flash” issue using the z-axis. That didn’t work. Bold Chat support was had to come by and after scouring the internet our html team learned a little bit more about this strange sucupus they call “flash”.

This client’s site was using SWFObject Express Install to load the flash. By simply adding the following tag inside the object.

<param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>

Once added in the HTML the problem was slved. While this may seem so fundamental and not worth a post to many of you this information specific to live chat was non-existent on the web. We can say once we told this to our flash expert he chuckled and responded with a “duh” as he walked away chortling.

Here is the code (with the SWFObject replacement code removed for simplicity)

<object classid="clsid:xxx-xxxx-xxx-xxx" name="howto"
width="your with" height="your height" id="you id" title="your image title">
<param name="movie" value="/flash/animation-green.swf" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent"/>
</object>
Posted in Code, Flash, Web Design | Leave a comment