Why Google removed my “site links”, need your help

HI

Any body knows why Google removes site links? We have a very old domain that had “site links” for more than a year, but today when I searched for my brand name I saw google removed these.

And it’s that site which has recently got some false direct visitors increment and bounce rate has increased from 14% to 60%, here is that thread we discussed a few days back. http://forums.seochat.com/search-engine-optimization-28/bounce-rate-increased-from-14-to-50-pls-help-197498.html

I think it’s because of the bounce rate, what do you guys think?

many thanks in advance

I don't think it is because of the bounce rate. It may be possible that you have lost large number of incoming links to your website. Same thing happened with me. My company's website lost site links on google India when i removed some incoming links from my other website (hosted in India). But my company's website still has site links on google UK and Google US.

man i think you are talking about SERPs but actually i am talking about "Google Sitelinks" (addition links which google shows like if i search seochat, google shows addition links from the site ...... my ranking are Good but only i lost "Google Sitelinks"

i am also talking about those additional links only. It is possible to loose site links even if you still have number 1 ranking position. It is an indication by google to speedup your link building as soon you will loose your number 1 ranking.

i doubt if it would be the case "It is an indication by google" .... we have been getting lots of one-way relevant links BUT i think the problem with our site looks that its because of our Bounce rate which has been increased for 2 weeks now .... so may be Google think that the site is no longer useful as of past thats why visitors come and go in seconds (just my guess)



but i wounder if its possible, sitelinks should be shown on all networks on the the domain name query .... and yes its possible for other terms to show or not .... but what i have lost is on domain name query

When this happened to us, I assessed our backlinks.

We had lost a high pr relevent backlink.

When the link came back, so did our sitelinks.

You might have something here. i think site links are in some way being determined by user behavior. The 8 links i have are pretty much my eight most visited pages. Some have external links to them and some don't. Thus high bounce rates could be telling google that your site is not really an authority for the terms you used to have sitelinks for.

But then again it could just be a loss of juice....

IMHO the most probable cause is loss of key links.

I'm curious to know how Google could know your "bounce rate" unless you have analytics installed or the surfers have the Google toolbar?

If analytics is required in order to assess the BR then it would be foolish for Google to use this method of evaluation imho, because they would risk losing analytics accounts.
If they use toolbar information, I would think that they risk "losing touch with the real world" (because the vast majority of Google toolbar users must be webmasters/seo's).

Google can watch visitors to google.com who click on your SERP listing then monitor for that visitor to make another detectable action in their SERPs. If a visitor clicks into your site, leaves immediately and then clicks on something in the SERPs below your listing then Google knows that you probably didn't have what the visitor wanted.

Maybe Google bookmarks data is also used.

I have a site and the homepage has site links. Those site links appear all of the time for some search queries and they have also appeared and disappeared for my primary search query.

For our main search query we had them immediately from when Google first started showing the site links. We also held #1 and #2 for that query. Then when Wikipedia moved into position #3 the site links immediately disappeared. They have appeared and disappeared as Wiki has moved in and out of #3.

My personal guess is that sitelinks are given to those sites that are absolutely, unquestionably, dominant for a query. If another site gets close to your dominance the site links go away.

They'll be confused by me then... I almost always right-click and select "open in new tab" - so that I can make multiple selections from the serps - before I go look at them

I think this is the most likely reason. Thus retaining your sitelinks will be dependant on you retaining your backlinks (or replacing lost ones) for the relevant KW's and increasing them at the same rate (or faster) than your (closest) competition.

thanks gazzahk, EGOL, ClickyB for your helpful replies !

Let wait for a week or so and let see what happens next.

One of my site which had got sitelinks 4 months ago, google removed these links twice and brought back then (these sitelinks comes on our site brand name query). so i have observed that the bounce rate of that site is around 68/70 % (actually that’s a health products comparison market place, and almost the site ranks on quite specific pages, and clicking on “buy now” carry the visitors to merchant site, that’s why the bounce rat is higher) ….. so I am not sure if it could be the reason of “Back links” as I told earlier we have been working on link building for a long time. BUT I guess it’s because of “BOUNCE RATE” as my that site has been getting and losing it. And now very unfortunately my this authority site (with age of 10 years, getting 3000 + organic visitors per day) got a false direct traffic, that’s not yet solved, caused a high bounce rate on both direct and organic visitors. So I am sure that I have quality back links and we don’t have any other issue except of this, so I would say that the BOUNCE RATE could be the reason.



But actually we lost it on our brand name query ..... and you are right that "sitelinks" which comes on keywords query need back links

This may be true as to why you get them. But what determines which pages are being displayed. This I think is where user behavior comes in. i agree with EGOL that you get them when google sees you as an absolute authority for a search term. I for example get them for four different versions of my company name. Two very abreviatted versions for which I have no (to my knowledge) back link using that anchor text. In fact there is a Govt website (a govt quango -has lots of links) directly under me for two of my sitelinks that has the exact keyword as their domain name (ie the abreviation that brings up my site links is the same as their domain name) which my site comes up with a SL. Thus google must be using user behavior to decide that when people type this combination of letters they are looking for my site. Link Juice just does not make direct sense as the LJ is keyword search netural.

As commented earlier google needs to decide which internal pages to display. I cannot see how anything other then user behavior being used here. As i said it is not just LJ with my site. The pages displayed are not the ones with the most juice to a large degree. Some displayed pages have no external links at all. They are on the whole the most visited though.

I really do not think this is a problem for google. I imagine they use a combination of four things. a) bounce rate from search 2) the toolbar 3) analytics 4) Human quality control to check qulaity of serps.

I would speculate that google toolbar data is such a massive sampeling segement that can be cross referenced with those sites that have analytics installed to see if the TB normally is returning accurate results of user behavior. They are now in a exteneded testing stage to see if the sitelinks generated by these metrics are improving qulaity of SERPs.

There does not seem to be any other way of determing a) that the site is the authority for that search term; and b) which internal pages should be displayed.

Related question: Does anyone know the number of users that have google toolbar installed?

HI

just wanted to share this experiment with you, as I was telling that the bounce rate could be the reason. After solving that we got our “sitelinks” back .

I think it’s an accurate experiment, what do you think?