How Google Sitelinks May Work, From Patent Application

Back in September, Vanessa Fox at the Official Google Blog shared with us a little information about sitelinks, the groups of links to internal pages that sometimes appear under the top result on a search results page. She also pointed to a page on Google’s Webmaster Help Center that provides some more details. A patent filing with a pretty generic name, Systems and methods for providing search results came out last week on these extra internal links. It held a couple of surprises…

The first was how much Google relied upon log file analysis and measuring user behavior (including toolbar use, according to the patent application), to decide whether or not to show these sitelinks, and which links to show.

Also interesting was that one of the pages that Google may try to include in these sitelinks is one where people can make purchases, filling a need for searchers involved in a transactional search (as opposed to a navigational or information undertaking.) I have more on the details at SEO by the Sea in Google’s Listings of Internal Site Links for Top Search Results.