All About Google SiteLinks & Anchors

When you're doing a normal search on Google, you may recognize something called "Google Sitelinks" in the results (they are very prominent in wikipedia results) and it can be a very valuable way to increase your CTR (click through rates) within the Google search engine results pages. For example, when you search for "charlie chaplin", you will find the following in Google:

Do you see the additional links "early life", "pioneering film artist", etc? These are what we call Google "sitelinks". They are additional hyperlinks which show in the Google results so someone scanning the results can actually be directed to a SPECIFIC SECTION of a page within the results. This is especially useful on pages that have a LOT of content on them and you want to provide an "anchor" so the visitor can find this content immediately without scrolling down the page too long.

Previously, it was thought that this option of sitelinking in the Google results was only for "authority" websites such as Wikipedia etc, however, this is NOT the case! You can employ this strategy as well by using the proper code in your HTML. Look at the code in this example web page we'll call Meta Tags Explained and look for the code a href=”meta-tags-uncovered.html#author.

The “hash” is an “anchor” on the page and allows you to go to a certain spot on the page. So, all you need to do in order to get these sitelinks is to create some anchors on a page, and then reference those anchors with some links, even internal links.

That is it! Now, we cannot guarantee this will work on ALL websites but it did in all of our testing, and we highly recommend you try this out for yourself as it will greatly increase the click through rate you receive in the search engine result pages.

If you're interested in more tips like this, please join our list in the upper right hand corner of the page and we'll be glad to share them with you!

Matt Connelly