How do I EXPAND my sitelinks?

[SEO5Team]

Google pulls sitelinks in an automated manner based on what they feel is important for your site and would help the user access your site better. According to Google:

"There are best practices you can follow, however, to improve the quality of your sitelinks. For example, for your site's internal links, make sure you use anchor text and alt text that's informative, compact, and avoids repetition."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Another good post below:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/google-sitelinks-2

[CMC-SD]

This is happening because Google is certain that [facebook] is a branded search, and less certain that [test] is a branded search. Expanded sitelinks only appear on branded searches. For contrast, search [test.com] or [speedtest] and you'll see expanded sitelinks.

[Travis-W]

Thanks for the response. How can I make my company name a more branded search term? Even when I search for "consumerbase.com" (my actual site) it is still displaying the un-expanded sitelinks.

[CMC-SD]

Oh, I thought you were talking about the companies in your screenshot. Are you searching [consumerbase.com]? I see what you mean now about the small sitelinks. I'm not sure why Google isn't treating that as a normal branded search.

[Travis-W]

Those were just examples.  Ideally we want expanded sitelinks to show for searches for both "consumerbase" and "consumerbase.com".

[CMC-SD]

How much branded traffic are you getting right now? My guess is, Google still needs to learn that your site is what searchers overwhelmingly want when they search [consumerbase] or [consumerbase.com]. Maybe there's a threshold for branded clicks before the algorithm becomes confident about that.

[Klarke]

I lost "megasitelinks" as well recently.  I think it may be due to changes or tweaks they are making.

Terms I had sitelinks for before were:

domain.com;
domain

Now I only have sitelinks for:

www.domain.com;
http://www.domain.com

Your site shows similar behavior.  I expect the megasitelinks will reappear soon as they make further changes.

[Travis-W]

We used to have them too (see attached screenshot from August). Did you make any large changes to your site before you lost the megasitelinks (structure/content/etc.)? We made some large changes and restructured our site after this screenshot was taken, but we can't pinpoint the date we lost the sitelinks. If you didn't change your content, then maybe it wasn't these changes that made us lose ours.

AugustLinks.png

[Travis-W]

I neglected to mention we used to have expanded sitelinks (see attached image from August).

I've dug through our Analytics and our traffic from the branded keywords 'consumerbase' and 'consumerbase.com was actually larger in October than it was in August.

AugustLinks.png

[Klarke]

I corrected several thousand 404s.  A further 10,000 404s were turned into 410s since they aren't coming back,  I can't redirect them, and I want google to stop crawling them to conserve crawl budget.

But none of the changes were affected the main content of the site.

I should mention that the site was hit in the May Penguin update.

[Debdulal]

_If the keyword you are searching is a brand and no other companies are targeting that keyword [this is my assumption here], you will get an extended sitelinks. But when the keyword is too generic [as is the case with you], you might have to settled with text only site links. _