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Ask the Experts: Will Google Penalize Me for Building…

March 29, 2007
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: I have a business selling big and tall men’s coats online. I was going to start attempting to build some links as suggested in your book but it was suggested to me that if I managed to get too many links, that my site may get Google sandboxed as it is only 1 year old and may look suspect.

Could you tell me if this is maybe correct, and if so what speed should I try to get links added. My friend suggested 1 a week.

A: It’s true that there are penalties for websites building a lot of links in an “unnatural” way in a short time, but we don’t think this would be an issue for someone in your situation. We think this problem most often applies to spammers, scrapers, or people who own hundreds or thousands of domains and work to build status by interlinking between them. Your site contains real, unique content and a legitimate product, and should be able to build links naturally without any problems on the search engines.

If you are concerned that you’re building links too fast (that’s a pretty nice problem to have!), just be sure that they’re coming from a wide variety of types of sites (that is, they are not all from within comment postings, or bulletin boards, instead, they are a mix of blogs, social bookmarking sites, static sites, etc.), and most importantly, that as many links as possible are from sites that focus on similar content to your website. Keep your focus on the overall site quality and the relevance to your target audience and it’s very unlikely there will be any penalty.

ask the experts

Ask the Experts: What are those Secondary Links in…

March 26, 2007
by Jennifer Grappone

Q: I have a quick question for you about Google and the “secondary links” (I don’t know what they’re called) I’ve seen coming up on some sites, such on Amazon (the Music, DVD, Advantage, and Web Services links):

Do you ladies know what these are called and how to get them?

A: The secondary results you’re describing started showing up in Google’s search results sometime around the Summer of 2005 when they were doing a bunch of experiments with their search results. They don’t have a name that we know of – we think “secondary links” is a fine moniker for them! You may also hear them called “quick links.” {UPDATE: Google calls them “Google Sitelinks” so we will too. Thanks for setting the standard, G!}

Clearly, secondary links such as these are very desirable from an SEO perspective: not only do they give your website much more screen real estate on the search results, but they may help your audience click directly to a more targeted landing page on your website.

Can I Make Google Sitelinks to Display for My Site?

There’s plenty of debate about what triggers these results, and of course Google’s keeping mum about the whole thing. We can tell you that the secondary links are algorithmic, meaning that they are not hand-edited or fee-based, but rather that they are generated automatically. They show only for the first ranked site in the search results and seem to appear only for large sites {UPDATE: on further investigation, or an evolving algorithm, some small sites now have Sitelinks too}. The selection of which sub-pages will be linked may be based on the level of traffic to the sub-pages, or other factors. Our best guess is that it’s based on traffic as measured on the Google toolbar, but we don’t have any hard evidence. {UPDATE: Google has written on the subject on their Webmaster Help Center , stating: “Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.”

Further analysis (and some very educated guesswork) by SEO By the Sea states:

“How does the search engine choose which pages to show? The patent application tells us that those pages are the ones that searchers might most likely want to access.

This could be based upon a log file analysis which tells the search engine:

How many times the page has been accessed.

How long visitors stayed upon the page.

If a visitor scrolled down the page, or clicked on a link without scrolling down.

Information retrieval scores for the page, along with an indication of how good a match the page may be for the query that was used in the search.

The likelihood that someone might make a purchase on that page.

Other information that might indicate that someone would be interested in the page

Another prominent voice in SEO stated:

“I suspect they are now based on the link popularity of your internal pages, mixed with how many internal links you have pointing to your inner pages added with the popularity from external links.”

So, in answer to the most important question, “how can I get these for my site?” the answer is, basically, pursue standard SEO practices. Try to build traffic, fill your site with great content that will keep visitors on your site, gain as many inbound links to your site sub-pages as possible, and hope for the best. Sorry we don’t have better news to share!

Controlling your Sitelinks with Google Webmaster Tools

[update, 3/2008] If you are fortunate enough to have Sitelinks on your listing, you can exert some control over them using Google Webmaster Tools. The tool does not allow you to add or edit the links, but you can use the tool to remove links, if there are any that are undesirable. See instructions on Google’s help pages.