“The snippet is the 2-line summary that appears along with the link to the website. Sitelinks are additional links to deeper pages or directories within the main site that is listed at number one for the search term.”

if you search with the term “somewhereinblog” in google, you will see google sorted up some sitelinks for you(see the screen shot below).

snippet & sitelinks of a normal search result

let’s look at another example…

sitelinks result for facebook

viewing the sitelinks in the result, some questions quickly ran through in my mind and finally i got the answers which i would like to share with you all.

1. question #1: can i set such links for my other sites also?

• snippets are automatically generated. so you can’t place them by paying money.
• sites with traffic levels above a certain level are usually listed with snippets.
• sites with high traffic might not include snippets in the listing if the most relevant page being served is not the homepage.

so somewhereinblog has good traffic. sitelinks for other sites is subject to the traffic, you can do nothing here other than trying to increase the traffic of your site.

2. question #2: can i customize the sitelinks ?i want to place some other links say “groups”, “bangla settings”, “kono somosha” etc. under the result rather than showing some other less important links.

• the google snippets’ sitelinks are usually the most popular links as determined by visitor usage ( it collects site usage data via google analytics, google toolbar etc.).
• so i can’t add my favorite links here… it is created automatically based on popularity to help the users to go there directly.

3. question #3: but i don’t like some links anyway… can i remove the links that i dislike ?

• if you think that the sitelinks displayed for your site are inappropriate or incorrect, you can block them so that they no longer appear(from “webmaster tools”).
• it’s also notable that google only display sitelinks when a site has a minimum of three sitelinks available. if you have two or fewer unblocked sitelinks, no sitelinks at all will appear in google search results for your site.

4. question #4: hmm, i know about my site better than you. you should have the feature of adding links also… grrrr…

• in the google webmasters/site owners help page for sitelinks, they wrote…
  

  at the moment, sitelinks are completely automated. we’re always working to improve our sitelinks algorithms, and we may incorporate webmaster input in the future.

so, now things are pretty clear to me. not bad at all. but getting the right answers need me to search several times in several ways. so i thought it would be better to share it with you all. may be you also find it interesting.

thank you all .

references: *** interested people can read these articles too…

1. google search result snippets
2. sitelinks help content from google support page
3. video: anatomy of a search snippet from matt cutts blog

N.B. it’s a pretty old note. posting lately .