Sunday, October 05, 2008

Google sitelinks not found and broken


I put my 9 year old son to work today testing SpellingCity.com. The rationale was that we made some site optimizations this week to improve performance ...so just to be sure, lets test to see if the site still works....

First thing my son D tried was to google the site to find it. I almost told him not to waste his time. I'm glad that I didn't. In Google, in addition to the main site link, there are a number of (what I just learned) are called: "Google Sitelinks". I've never paid much attention to them before (pictured above). But, son D clicked on one that produced a 404 error. hmmmm. So I started researching and learned from a Google forum that:

Sitelinks are created algorithmically to help users quickly navigate to the information they need on your site. To display sitelinks, Google must basically determine: 1) a relevant structure for your site conducive to sitelinks, and 2) that sitelinks will be helpful for the user's query.

What should I do if my sitelinks are not useful or, as in my case, going nowhere? BTW, I know the reason. One of our optimizations this week was to remove joomla's SEO-friendly feature since it turns out not to be high-performance-friendly. sigh.

The official google webmaster blog (quoted above) continues:
For your verified site in Webmaster Tools, you can view your available sitelinks.

But I can't seem to find this anywhere in my webmaster tools. More specifically, when I click thru to the option where it's supposed to list my sitelinks and allow me block any sitelinks, I get a message that no sitelinks exist (see the picture). Great. So I've asked google on their official blog for help. I admit that I have very low expectations for an answer but, we'll see. Stay tuned, maybe tomorrow, I might have answers on how to find and fix them..... Also, how to get a decent Jooma 404 page-not-found page up....See you tomorrow.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Love your blog. You tell it how it is. You have all the real problems of a real webmaster in the real world. Ain't it dandy? I'll give you 5 to 1 against google answering....