Sitelinks in non-brand based organic search results

[KBB_Digital]

Hi all,

I have a question for everyone. Sitelinks have been around for a while now & I've always seen them when the search is for a brand's name.

However, today, when looking at the rankings for one of the campaigns we manage, we noticed there were sitelinks in the number #1 & #2 positions in Google (Australia) for the search term "Dance Costumes".

Whilst both the companies have Dance Costumes in their title, so do all the other results & so I don't see why it warrants the sites to be relevant via their brand name.
Note: The results are organic results, not paid results (where you can add sitelinks).

Firstly, has anyone seen this before (screenshot attached)?
And secondly, is there markup/schema that allows you to do this (none that I know of)?

danceCostumes-sitelinks.png

[OlegKorneitchouk]

http://awesomescreenshot.com/0083hrd674

I think it's automatically chosen by Google. You can only tell Google which pages you'd prefer not to be sitelinks.

[KBB_Digital]

Thanks for the response Oleg,

Great to see that there's other examples of these sitelinks out there on generic search phrases.

I do understand that you can only tell Google the sitelinks you don't want users to see, but is there any difference on these sitelinks, as to how Google determines to show them?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Usually these are the pages that have the most internal authority next to the homepage. We see this in a couple of occasions for terms that are not related to our brand. They picked in our case the links that had the most internal links to it as they were linked site-wide.

[KBB_Digital]

Thanks Martijn,

I put the question out on Google+ communities as well & it looks like that was the general consensus as well.

The only side I don't understand, is why it chose to show it only on the those first two listings & none of the others.

I'm guessing it's because the site & those individual pages are less authoritative in general.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I've seen this before that they only show extensions to a URL in the first couple of listings. I think it has more to do with how Google wants to show the top results than with the authority they have. Although there probably will be some correlation between the two.