Topical Sitelinks

[linklater]

This is a question about the non-branded, topical sitelinks SERP - i.e. those sitelinks without additional descriptive text, that tend to be shown for queries that are information centered as opposed to brand-centric.

I'm been noticing an increase in these among some big brands in the travel vertical, and wanted to throw it out there to the esteemed Moz community.

Are these the preserve of big site SEO/brands, or is there anything we can/should be doing to increase our chances of getting these topical sitelinks to appear?

Cheers!

rkdVaDN

[dotfly]

The only way to get a chance to be mentioned with such highlighted data is to have a really good working markup structure... you can use the data highlighter tools within WMT f.ex. or data vocabulary markup language / schema.org

older article : http://moz.com/blog/schema-examples

[iSTORM-New-Media]

As Marc has pointed out, you can't choose them, you can only increase your chances of having them appear by having the correct markup and appearing higher in search results.

One other thing to note is that you can demote a sitelink in Webmaster Tools under the "Search Appearance" tab. For each search result page, you can demote specific pages you wouldn't want to appear as a sitelink.

But I would absolutely recommend having Schema markup to have full descriptive sitelinks for search results, especially your branded ones. More real estate you can have in search the better