"Usually when you search for a social site like Twitter or MySpace, you’re looking for information from your friends and social network, like their tweets and profile pages," says Google Director of Product Management Mike Cassidy, Director of Product Management. "A social sitelink includes your friend’s name and profile photo, and it links to her content on a particular website. Social sitelinks are based on the same technology as Google Social Search; we use your social circle to identify relevant websites and user pages."

Google launched Social Search early this year as "the first step in an ongoing effort to make Gogle search as social as as the web itself." What it does is simply surface public web content from your social connections. You’ve probably seen results produced from it show up in results many times over the last year (if you use Google while signed in). 

"To see social sitelinks in action, try a search for [twitter] or [youtube]," says Cassidy. "If you’re not seeing social sitelinks, try creating a Google profile and adding links in your profile to other online social sites you belong to so we can build your social circle."

If these sitelinks only show up when the user searches for the social network itself, I’m not sure what the advantage is over simply finding your friends on the network itself, but it is one more way to bring social to search, I suppose. The major search engines are doing everything they can to make search more social, and there’s nothing wrong with that, because social can add a helpful layer of relevancy to the search process. 

In fact, Google is in the process of adding a social layer to many of its products as it looks for a way to tap into users’ social relationships the way Facebook has been able to do. Connecting people with their friends anywhere possible can only add to this goal.

While this particular move by Google doesn’t appear to be incredibly significant, it’s just part of Google’s whole strategy to keep your friends close by.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

"When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad," says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format."

"You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign," Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as "Show additional links to my site" in the "Ad Extensions" section.

The first new feature is that the site selector now lists all verified sites that the user owns. It also allows the user to search as they type.

The second new feature is the ability for users to block non-homepage sitelinks. Previously, if users owned something like example.com, they were not able to block sitelinks for something like example.com/email.

The third feature lets users see URL removal requests submitted by other users for any sites they own, and revoke them if necessary. "In the past, if another webmaster for your site mistakenly removed a URL on your site and left for vacation it was a difficult process to undo the request," explains Webmaster Tools Product Manager Sagar Kamdar.

The home page is also easier to navigate now. There is no a clear distinction between verified and unverified sites.

Simply referred to as "sitelinks," such pages might take you to an about page or a help page, or really anything deemed beneficial to the user by Google’s algorithm. The example below for a NASA search displays links for Gallery, Missions, Aeronautics, etc.

Google has now adjusted the algorithm so that some sites beyond that first result actually show sitelinks too. They’re not exactly displayed the same way, and don’t necessarily include as many links, but they show sitelinks on a single line underneath the result (as opposed to the bigger, 2 column approach used with the top result).

Google shares an example, looking at a search for "nutrition," which retrieves results in which the top three each have single-line sitelinks:

The addition of more sitelinks to search results can potentially benefit wembasters in the form of increased visibility and traffic, but how do you get them to show up?

Unfortunately, you can’t just flip them on like a switch. It’s all in the algorithm. "Just like regular sitelinks, one-line sitelinks are generated algorithmically and the decisions on when to show them and which links to display are entirely based on the expected benefit to users" explains Google at the Webmaster Central Blog.

On the flipside, if you definitely don’t want a certain page to ever show up as a sitelink, you can block this using Google Webmaster Tools, as Google is kind enough to point out. In fact, the company even says that they’re speeding up the blocking of these links for such requests.

When Google’s search results provide more than one link to a certain site, the site looks authoritative.  The presence of multiple links also makes it more likely that a searcher’s question will be answered, and even the least discerning searcher may just go to the site because all the links are easy to click.

This development could be rather important to some site owners, then.  Matt Cutts, for example, tweeted, "Yay, I have sitelinks for the query [matt cutts] after 2+ years!"

Barry Schwartz then asked, "Why did it take Matt over two years to get Sitelinks for his domain when it is such an authoritative source?  The answer might be that his content was on a sub-directory.  Yes, right now, there is no substantial content on www.mattcutts.com, all or most the content is on www.mattcutts.com/blog/.  And it seems like Google is now giving sub directories Sitelink love."

Given the season we’re approaching, all this inclusiveness is nice.  It isn’t bad considering the economic situation, either, if some site owners can now attract more traffic.

Both the major search engines have been executing some algorithm changes causing the usual ranking turmoil for webmasters and site owners over the last week.

While Google has made no formal announcement, the subtle mention of some tweaks associated to the new site links enhancement "twice the sitelinks" might have been the clue.

Site owners have been sharing mixed stories in the forums, with one reporting his listing dropped from being ranked 19th to outside 1000 – overnight. Others are suggesting their listings have been up and down in a matter of days. Here’s a couple of the other comments at webmasterworld:

"…My biggest site has been jumping from SERP#1 to SERP#-16-20 and back several times…"

"…my ranking is fluctating and in whole there is loss in visitors…"

Yahoo! on the other hand announced the changes with the release of its X-Robots-Tag support. According to their post:

"…we’ll be rolling out additional changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days. We expect the update will be completed early next week, but you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index during this process."

At this critical time of year for most online businesses, these index and ranking updates will be an unwelcome surprise. Have you seen your rankings change over the last week? – if so, share your experiences.

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Google Sitelinks, are the internal page links displayed for a website in Google’s results, normally when a search is done for the site’s title. For example, if you were to do a search for "ineedhits" in Google, you’d see the following at the top of the search results.

NOTE: sitelinks are not displayed for all websites.

The team at Google have now let you control the sitelinks that are displayed to avoid exposure to web pages that you might not want listed or highlighted. According to the release post:

"Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster."

To control which sitelinks you want displayed, log into Google Webmaster Central (assuming you have already verified your website), then click the "links" option from the side navigation and choose "sitelinks" from the menu displayed.

Once you’re in there, you can decide which ones you want blocked, ensuring any traffic from Google’s sitelinks goes to the pages that matter most. While selection of sitelinks by Google is done by the algorithm, website owners (at this stage) are unable to specify which pages they would like displayed as sitelinks. I can’t see Google allowing site owners to add new sitelinks anytime soon.

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 Google determines these sitelinks automatically so you usually don’t have a say in that, but now you can disable specific sitelinks. Just go to the Google Webmaster Tools, verify your site in question, and switch to the Links -> Sitelinks menu entry.

I can see the menu entry but don’t see the option to disable sitelinks yet for one of my sites which has sitelinks, but as I only verified that site just now, maybe it simply takes a bit of time. The official Google Webmaster Blog though posted a screenshot of what it should look like.

In related news, Search Engine Land reports that sometimes, up to 8 sitelinks will be displayed now instead of the usual 4. Can anyone find an example for that?

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First, Search Engine Land spots them testing ten Sitelinks on some mobile devices, then they confirm that there will soon be eight Sitelinks in SERPs (pictured below is the current version, showing only four).

And now Google announces that with you can control your Sitelinks through Webmaster Central. Here’s how the process works:

Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you won’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users.

Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.

In the Webmaster Tools Dashboard, you’ll find this capability under Links > Sitelinks. I’m a bit unclear as to why the webmaster’s block would expire after 90 days.

However, if your site doesn’t already have sitelinks included in your Google listings, you can’t add them. Discovering sitelinks is still an automatic, algorithmic process for Google.

Search Engine Land also spotted more Webmaster Central improvements:

• “query stats . . . breakdown by date range”
• “receipts for any spam reports, paid link reports, reconsideration requests, and crawl rate change requests you’ve filed”
• “a form of a duplicate content warning,” called “High URL Counts”

As always, many of these features have long been requested by users, including during Matt Cutts’ open call at SMX Advanced.

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Google Webmaster Central has a tissue and a flashlight for them. On the official Webmaster Central blog, they announced six months of historical data will be available:

Now you can jump between 9 query stats snapshots ranging from now to 6 months ago. Note that the time interval for each of these snapshots is different. For the 7 day, 2 week, and 3 week snapshots, we report the top queries for the previous week. For the 1 to 6 month snapshots, we report statistics for the previous month. And still others of you who log in may notice that you don’t have query stats data going back to 6 months ago. We hope to improve that experience in the future.

Google also made a “download data” feature available, for the spreadsheet-obsessed data fiends out there. All the stats for Top Search Queries may be downloaded in a convenient CSV format.

Another feature shows top queries by percentage, something Google used to only show ranked by query results and clicks. That was partially helpful, but this change should make it easier to see which queries really carried visitors to a site.

Interesting commentary from former Webmaster Central goddess Vanessa Fox will be a welcome read for webmasters. Vanessa noted the addition of information about sitelinks, those extra results appearing below some search results.