Google Sitelinks Keep Getting Bigger: Good or Bad?

Google finally announced the mega, huge and jumbo sitelinks we have seen them testing for months.

Let me take you through the history of Sitelinks, even before they were named sitelinks.

In July 2005, Google had this format:

Then a month later, it looked more like this:

Here is one from 2006:

Then can other forms, I'll skip some, but here are the anchor based sitelinks:

Then also the two column view:

Heck, even AdWords sitelinks:

But now the Jumbo sitelinks are here:

The algorithm has changed for how Google handles this, they will show up to twelve results plus likely show less indented results for the same domain. Is this a good thing for online reputation management?

In addition, we're making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links. This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page. Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them. The number of sitelinks will also vary based on your query—for example, [museum of art nyc] shows more sitelinks than [the met] because we're more certain you want results from www.metmuseum.org.

For more of our coverage on Google Sitelinks see our Google Sitelinks category.

What are your thoughts?

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld, Google Blogoscoped Forums, DigitalPoint Forums and Cre8asite Forums.