On August 16th, Google launched a new and improved version of Sitelinks. Sitelinks are links to important pages in a website that appear on searches under the main domain. These links help people find specific information that they may be looking for, like the contact page or the downloads page instead of having them browse through all your website.

Here's how the change will impact the search experience and search results for your website:

• The first improvement is Visibility. The links are bigger with full-sized text, include a green URL and a one line description for each link. This makes it easier to read them, understand what they are about, but more importantly, make the top site in a search result dominate a big section of the search results page, making it even more important to be on top and be well optimized to get these links.
• The second improvement is Flexibility. Sitelinks were pretty much fixed depending on the site and the optimization. From now on, the sitelinks will vary depending on the search query and the maximum number of sitelinks that can appear has been increased to 12. This number also varies by query to make the links much more relevant to what people search.
• The third element is Clarity. Before this change, pages from a website could show up as sitelinks, regular results or both. Now, if a page is shown as a sitelink, it will not show underneath as a result and even if the page is not as a sitelink, all other results below will be from different domains, increasing competition and fairness to results. Links to other sections of a site may be shown when all the links and the main result are related to one section. For example, if a site shows on top for its blog and shows several sitelinks to its blog posts, it is possible that the About Us section or the Services section may show as an additional result below if relevant to the search query.

Why is Google implementing these changes? Quality. They have made quality improvements on the system and have linked the link structure of a website into the traditional ranking system to try and create a combined and unified search algorithm.

Search Engine Optimization helps in getting your sitelinks. Google grants the inner pages links on results when the information is relevant, well organized and properly categorized.