On October 13, Google announced that they would be removing the demote sitelinks feature within the Google Search Console. This tool that was first launched in October 2007, gave Webmasters the ability to tell Google that they didn’t want a specific URL to show up within the featured sitelinks section within Google search results. Google reported that they are removing this feature for the sake of simplification.
What exactly are sitelinks? They are the popular links that can be found in Google search results under the snippet.
“Over the years, our algorithms have gotten much better at finding, creating, and showing relevant sitelinks, and so we feel it’s time to simplify things,” according to the Google+ announcement Google published.
With this recent adjustment, what are webmasters going to do about sitelinks they don’t want showing up within the search results? Here are a few suggestions Google provided within their announcement:
- If you have to remove a page from search results completely, use a “noindex” robots Meta tag on that particular page.
- Use Fetch and Render to ensure that Google can properly index the essential pages of your website.
- Lastly, be sure your website has a clear structure. The best way to do this is to ensure that your website has a relevant internal link strategy and informative anchor text that isn’t repetitive.
If you still have any questions or concerns regarding this recent change, Google encourages webmasters to check out the Webmaster Central Help Forum.