Has anyone else tried using the Google Sitelinks feature in Google Webmaster Tools? I love the idea of it and as soon as I heard about it of course I ran out and submitted my requested edits to update the HP.com sitelinks to what we feel would be a better customer experience – not just for HP customers but for Google customers as well. At HP, we know what portions of our web site are the most popular and what make the most sense to provide in a consolidated search result for someone looking for HP on the web so I was eager to give Google my input. Unfortunately they only wanted to hear half of what I had to say.

In case you aren’t familiar with sitelinks, it’s a feature Google has added to more popular brands in that if you search for a brand e.g. Yahoo!, you see additional links as part of the first result from that brand’s domain:

In adding this user-friendly sitelinks feature, Google also gave the webmaster the ability to block certain links from the sitelinks for that domain in case they were providing links you didn’t feel appropriate for your domain or customers.

When I originally viewed our sitelinks they were pretty good – nice work on the automation part Google. I only had two changes to submit. Basically I wanted to remove a duplicate site and one that was far less popular and relevant and would be better replaced by our consumer store which wasn’t currently on the list (maybe because it’s on a separate subdomain?).

When you “block” links from your sitelinks in Google webmaster tools, there are free form fields where you are requested to enter reasoning for the removal. I figured if this was a free-form field, surely a human editor was reviewing it and would take my input into consideration. So in blocking two links I suggested replacements that made more sense and better represented all of our HP customers – thus providing a better, more relevant customer experience.

The pages I wanted removed were eventually removed – I think it took a couple of weeks but they’re gone. And they did add one of my suggested links – but not with the appropriate link text so it’s actually quite misleading as to what the destination page offers. Also, I think the “automation” took over once again and replaced one of my blocked URLs with another URL that points to the exact same page. Back to square one.

This is what the HP.com sitelinks look like today in Google if you search “HP”:

Unfortunately, Office Store and Office both go to the same place – and ironically it's not the business store as the link would imply but our “Home and Home Office” store – which is really the consumer and home office store and would be better represented by a link that indicated such. Our business store link, which used to be in the list, is now gone.

Today I will once again make an attempt to revise some of these links for more appropriate ones in hopes that Google will take my word that I know what customers coming to HP.com are most interested in.

I’m not sure at what point my manual intervention will override automation but what we at HP would suggest for our sitelinks is going to be a better, more relevant experience for our customers and Google’s so what would be the harm in my designating my own sitelinks?

By the way, I also noticed that some pretty popular sites don’t have sitelinks.

This is the message you get if Google has not generated Site Links for your site:

“Google has not generated any sitelinks for your site. Sitelinks are completely automated, and we show them only if we think they'll be useful to the user. If your site's structure doesn't allow our algorithms to find good sitelinks, or we don't think that the sitelinks are relevant to the user's query, we won't show them. However, we are always working to improve how we find and display sitelinks.”

In fact, when I search for Google, I don’t see any sitelinks for them (although I believe they’ve had some in the past based on the descriptive screen shot they use in the Links feature of Webmaster tools).

There are a few other well-known brands for which I’m surprised not to see sitelinks yet they do appear for lesser-known brands. If a site is ranking number one for their brand name, and they would like to add sitelinks for their brand, why not let them add the ones they find most relevant to their customers?

I realize this is a work in progress for Google but this is one of many instances where allowing more input by the webmaster makes more sense for Google customers than Google trying to automate evertying thus requiring webmasters to guess what it is they need to do to generate the most relevant sitelinks automatically. This is probably true for most sites, but for Enterprise sites in particular, it is not feasible to redesign home pages to test how sitelinks will appear. We either need clearer direction as to what generates these or we need to be able to provide them.

Again, love the new feature Google. Here's to hoping we can have more input so your searchers and our customers can better find what they're looking for.