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Google has implemented a while back, something we named Google Search Web Categories, basically, those little sub links you get under the URL to take you to other popular sections of a site. You can see an example if you search on search engine watch. So how does one earn those links? That is the topic of discussion at a thread in WebmasterWorld.
The answer? Well, no one really knows exactly. I would assume you would require lots of repetitive linkage data to the core sections of your Web site. For example, check out apple and you will notice the web categories for apple are "iTunes - Download iTunes - iPod+iTunes - QuickTime - online". Those are probably the four most popular sections on the site. Was it done manually? I doubt it, why would they use "online" to symbolize the Apple Store? So I believe it is based on linkage data.
Comments:
Erik
09/30/2005 03:52 pm
Barry, I covered this about <a href="http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/2005/08/top_google_resu.html">6 weeks ago</a> based on some of your original posts and a bit of work on my own, and we'll probably follow up soon. As for how they're earned, it seems to be a combination of a clean (i.e. text-based) home page + linkage to very popular subsections of a site (or to very popular related sites - see [honda]) + some level of trusted site status. But I'm more interested in the arbitrary way the links are generated than I am in who earns them. In most cases (like in your [apple] ex.), the link text used in the serp is from either an alt tag ("QuickTime") or the actual anchor text used on the site ("online"), but in a few cases, they're pulling the title from the destination page (such as "iTunes - Download iTunes"), but minus the "Apple" term. It's also been interesting to see the effect it has on visits, since pages are getting traffic from kw for which they don't even rank...
Barry Schwartz
09/30/2005 04:13 pm
Thanks Erik for the info. Very interesting...
aaron wall
10/03/2005 03:49 am
If you search for "SEO Book" on Google I have "February 2005" as one of my categories, and that really can't be from anything but internal linkage data. My first weblink is to my sales letter, which has a ton of linkage data. It would be fun to see if I could change it's Google link from "testimonials" to "as recommended by Google"