Demoted Sitelinks Not Going Away!!!

[Axis41]

I've demoted several sitelinks for one of our clients, but they are still showing up. They were demoted several weeks ago, so I would think that they would have been removed by now. I know that these demotions are merely suggestions for Google to follow, but they are usually good at honoring demotions.

The issue is that our client hosts several job portals for clients on subdomains of their site and still need traffic going to these pages. Redirect workarounds have been suggested on the Google WM forums, but this is a unique situation. Personally, I think that because our client is an HR software company, Google sees the client job portal sites on their subdomain as still being relevant to the overall site, and won't honor the demotions because of that.

Does anyone have any suggestions or experience with subdomains and sitelinks? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

[stevefidelity]

It sounds like you've definitely waited enough time for Google to make a change, so that doesn't seem to be an issue. I can only imagine that Google is still displaying these unwanted sitelinks because it's relevant to the users' search queries and is receiving a solid CTR.

If we're talking about the traditional site links (those that include a small snippet of text, i.e, the meta description tag) you can try to tweak the meta description tag in a way to try to increase your CTR for the pages that you would ideally like to show up as a sitelink.

This seems counter-intuitive in many ways, but for the pages that you want to demote, maybe you tweak the meta description tag to make it less attractive for the user to click on.

Hard to comment further without knowing more specifics.