I can’t take credit for this discovery of Google’s latest test in the UK but a colleague at work discovered on a brand related search an expanded information based result occupying the the top left PPC position.

Click to expand:

What’s interesting is where the data is being pulled from, you’ll see in the screenshot below that Google takes “Facts from 7 websites including en.wikipedia.org, gb.kompass.com and linkedin.com”. This is quite a powerful addition to any brand listing having this appear and supports the need for brands to have positioning on those areas.

I know there have been a number of other posts discussing sitelinks for a while now but there looks to be more of a UK rollout happening this week. I’ve been searching on a number of brands and getting mixed results, luckily “SEOUnique” brings up the additional 12 links as you can see below (click to enlarge):

Now I’m still looking at why some brands are showing these and some are not, I’m confident that a number of big brands which I’ve checked have more link value and authority than this blog so there must be another deciding factor – or alternatively it’s still being tested on different queries/geographical locations.

Another interesting point is that will sites now need to optimise more for the first 30/40 characters to avoid poor descriptions on the sitelinks? – maybe.

Either way it looks that this will be a more standard roll-out of organic sitelinks which will certainly help brands retain visitors and make it that little bit harder for competitors and affiliates.

**Update 11/07

I’ve been looking at potential triggers that sets off the extended sitelinks, I looked at most of the big brands online and got a mixed bag.

Search Query: “Lloyds” (http://www.lloydstsb.com/)

Search Query “Confused Car Insurance” (http://www.confused.com/)

Search Query(misspelling): “deisel” (http://www.diesel.com/)

So from looking at these various brands that have triggered expanded links we know that:

• Misspellings work
• Brand name can trigger them
• Number of links are not always 12 but sometimes can be 8
• It is working with brand + generic terms