Where do Sitelinks come from Daddy?

Luckily I was prepared to explain some of Google’s mysteries without embarrassment and without fear. Being an X-Navy submarine guy helped in this case. I went on to explain that there were some things we might never know about how Sitelinks were created, but we were informed a few years ago by a Google evangelist and former employee Vanessa Fox that Sitelinks were created automatically. I told him that Google could not reveal the secrets of some of it’s mysteries to normal people like us because evil SEO Black Hats would take that information and use it to manipulate the search algorithm and spam innocent searchers like us and our friends. He said “Oh that’s smart Daddy, I’m glad they’re looking out for us”. But then he got right back to the main question… “But why do YOU have sitelinks and all these other sites DON’T have sitelinks?” And I told him that I could only guess, but I felt that Google was tipping their hat to my webmaster skills and patting me on the back for being a good SEO. I told him I had only seen Sitelinks bestowed on sites that were easy to navigate and they had significant PageRank on their homepage and they had a good amount of high quality inbound links that were from relevant authority sites. And he said “Oh   t-h-a-t-’s   why…” and I said “Yes son, that’s why they gave them to us and they don’t give them to everybody in the neighborhood like it’s “Trick or Treat” or something like that.

I thought it was over. I got ready to get back to work. But just then he asked one more question before I kicked him out of the room so I could really get some work done. He looked at the Sitelinks again and he said, “But Dad, if this was really automatic, how did they know what to write?”. And I was about to answer but I did a double take on my own sitelinks. I assumed the Sitelink categories were actually like snippets that were made from either text on the page or possibly text from part of the meta description or meta title. But I found something that was a bit of a surprise. I found that on this particular WordPress site that my Sitelinks were made from:

• Tags from the blog posts (this surprised me at first)
• Blog Categories that appeared on my Nav Bar and SubNav Bar
• Blog Post Titles

And it all started to make sense to me, and my son told me that he understood this mystery of Google life enough to get back to Lego Star Wars on Playstation 3.  Of course Google had found out a way to make it easier for searchers by giving them a mini table of contents to a well structured site made from the site’s own major menu choices and blog tags of importance or relevance.

Here’s a screen print for the file: