Comments on: One Really Annoying Search Result at Google

By: PinkCakeBox

PinkCakeBox — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 15:34:14 +0000

Matt Cutts addressed this behavior in one of his comments. I find it hard to believe that people are missing sitelinks, but google claims their tests show otherwise:

Hart and Jean-Luc, you asked why we still show a second result from e.g. starbucks.com even if we show Sitelinks for starbucks.com at the #1 slot. That is intentional (not a bug), and the reason is that some people don’t notice the Sitelinks. We’ve done lots of UI tests to make the Sitelinks have the right amount of visibility, but showing a second result helps in those cases when people don’t notice the Sitelinks, which does happen.

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:09:11 +0000

@sheseltine - That’s actually the situation I have on a search for “small business sem”, and it doesn’t look good as an objective observer.

@Linda Bustos — Good question. I don’t know the status on that.

@rishil — it’s not a dream come true when the competition gets the extra real estate.

@incrediblehelp — I know why it happens, but I’m saying it shouldn’t. Once you get site links for a given phrase/query, they oughtta be able to turn off that domain for the rest of the top 10.

Great comments, folks - thanks so much,

By: incrediblehelp

incrediblehelp — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 04:45:51 +0000

Sure but this has much more to do with a websites internal linking and Google’s inability to handle websites linking to the same page 1-2-3 different ways. Really has nothing to do with Sitelinks at all. The problem is totally separate.

By: rishil

rishil — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:13:36 +0000

Well I agree from a users point of view it can be annoying, but from a search merketers point of view isnt it a dream come true?

We all try to capitalise our real estate on the SERPs, especially with blended search, and I would hold on to that one with dear life

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:15:43 +0000

Yeah, I noticed when entering a friend’s business in Google yesterday that all the sub-domains were also listed individually (main site, forum, blog etc). I thought Google was going to treat subdomains like sub-folders to reduce the amount of sub-domains that appear in serps. Has that supposed to have taken effect already or did they change their mind?

By: Eric Lander

Eric Lander — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:07:38 +0000

This is incredibly frustrating — perhaps it’s something that we should respond to via the “Dissatisfied” link.

I love when you see this behavior in addition to the ten other links on the bottom of the SERPs labeled as “Searches related to: (query)”

By: sheseltine

sheseltine — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:49:00 +0000

The ones that irritate me the most are those that both display as a sitelink, and as an organic listing. It’s not just that you’re getting extra shelf space, you’re doubling up on the click potential of a page, and is that ‘about’ page really that valuable for a searcher?