Pixelrage.net

At work, our corporate account was invited into the beta of Google AdWords‘ own version of sitelinks: that mysterious but most welcome feature where a small “link directory” snippet appears below a search engine result on page 1, position 1 of Google.com

Working in similar fashion, AdWords lets you choose up to 10 links within your site that can be displayed within a “yellow box” AdWords placement (that would be a page 1, position 1 placement that appears in its own little highlighted yellow box at the top center of the page). These sitelinks are set in “priority order;” that is, the ones at the top get placement precedence above the ones underneath them.

Google AdWords’ own algorithm determines which of these sitelinks will appear for which query result/ad combo.

The sitelinks themselves have a 35 character maximum limit, with a 1024 character limit for the URL it points to. It’s a great way to advertise the major sub-sections of your site. Don’t forget to throw in a link to your “order now” or similar page, too. Be sure to use strings on these site link URLs for advanced tracking through Analytics (i.e., mysite.com/buy?cid=adwords:buypagesitelink) – that’s how I set mine up, at least.

I know what we’re all thinking: Google has found yet another way to make more money. Yes, it’s true. However, those sitelinks might help filter out worthless clicks and front-page bounces by helping people get to something more specific to what they were looking for. I’m all in for that.