Andrew Nevelos

Google recently began testing a drastic change to the way it displays sitelinks within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).Though the search juggernaut has modestly referred to the update as “new and improved” and “expanded and improved,” the most recent look is nothing less than extreme.

Sitelinks – the shortcuts to interior pages of your site created by Google in an automated fashion using proprietary algorithms — have gone through at least half a dozen changes since they were first introduced nearly five years ago, but none of these have been as drastic as the most recent change.

There are many changes to the anatomy of the sitelinks, the first being the sheer number, which Google has expanded from eight to 12 (although groups of two, four and eight are also returned). Google has also added a snippet of text averaging 30 characters and changed the font color of the URL to green (an update that was first tested in 2006). This change in particular makes the sitelinks look more similar to natural search results.

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