How To Control Sitelinks That Appear For Your Site In Google Search?
Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents.
This list of sitelinks is update periodically, so you may see different sitelinks for your site over a period of time. However, Google does allow website owners to control which sitelinks “should not” be displayed for your site.
Note: You cannot control which sitelinks should be shown, you only have control over which should not appear.
Most webmasters are unaware of the feature to disable certain sitelinks from appearing for their websites, this post will aim to teach users how to do that.
Step 1: Login to your Google Webmasters account, if you own a website and do not have a Google Webmasters account, we highly recommend users to add their website to Google webmaster account, we have a handy tutorial to get you started: How To Add Your Website To Google Webmaster Tools.
Step 2: From your dashboard, click on the website that you want to remove sitelinks from.
Step 3: Click on the Links link in the sidebar menu.
Step 4: Click on the sitelinks links from the content shown in the right hand side.
Step 5: In the new page that opens up, you will see the existing sitelinks for your website, click on the block link next to the sitelink you want to remove.
Step 6: Clicking on the link should display a form, where Google asks you the reason for removing this sitelink, select the appropriate reason from the dropdown menu and provide a optional comment, once your done with the form, click on the Block button, to remove the sitelink from search results.
On submitting the form Google will display a message, telling you that it has blocked the link till a certain date, though we are not exactly sure about this date, it could be the date when your sitelinks will be recreated.
The changes to your sitelinks will not be reflected till all of Google servers have been updated, check back to see if the sitelink has been removed after giving it ample amount of time to propagate on all the servers.
Are you a webmaster, looking for some more tips and tricks? Take a look at our Webmaster Tips section to find more interesting tips and tools.
computer helper
March 30th, 2009 at 2:41 pm #
That is a good tip. I always just thought that you HAD to use the sitelinks google provided. After you delete a sitelink, does it usually do a good job finding a new sitelink to replace the removed one?
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Robert
May 13th, 2009 at 6:21 pm #
once you block a sitelink, can you unblock it later?
Thank you
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Keith Dsouza Reply:
May 14th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
@Robot, yes you can unblock it later, just visit the same page as in the tutorial and click on the Unblock button next to the link you had blocked earlier.
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