During a hangout, one SEO professional asked John Mueller about sitelinks, and if you can force sitelinks to show up on the Google SERPs.
Their question was: is there any strategy by which desired pages can appear as a site link in Google’s search results?
John explained that site links are the additional results that are sometimes shown below a search result, where it’s usually just a one-line link to a different part of the website.
There is, however, no meta tag or structured data you can use to force a site link to show.
It’s more so that Google is trying to figure out what is actually related or relevant for users, when they’re looking at this one web page as well.
And for that, John’s recommendation is to have a good website structure and have clear internal links, so that it’s easy for them to recognize which pages are related to those pages.
He also recommends having clear titles that Google can use and show as a site.
And with that, it’s not that there is a guarantee that any of this will be shown like that, but it is something that kind of helps Google to figure out what is related.
And if Google thinks it makes sense to show it, then it will be a lot easier for them to choose one based on that information.
This happens at approximately the 16:02 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Question)
Is there any strategy by which desired pages can appear as a site link in Google search results?
John (Answer)
So site links are the additional results that are sometimes shown below a search result, where it’s usually just a one-line link to a different part of the website. And there’s no meta tag or structured data that you can use to kind of like enforce a site link to be shown.
And it’s a lot more that our systems try to figure out what is actually kind of related or relevant for users when they’re looking at this one web page as well. And for that, our recommendation is essentially to have a good website structure, to have clear internal links, so that it’s easy for us to recognize which pages are related to those pages, and to have clear titles that we can use and kind of show as a site.
And with that, it’s not that there’s a guarantee that any of this will be shown like that, but it kind of helps us to figure out what is related. And if we do think it makes sense to show us I think, then it’ll be a lot easier for us to actually choose one based on that information.