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

This morning all things are change on the Google front. First you’ll notice the Google.co.uk homepage looks a bit smaller than usual:

The homepage is much smaller than before, it does look crisper I do admit.

Once you perform a search you’ll see the following (click to enlarge):

Yesterday Google released their new iPhone browser layout which coincided with the dark grey bar at the top of Google on desktops. For a while now people had noticed URLs being displayed above listing descriptions, this appears to be now live although I’m not 100% if I’m just getting a test from a data center. The left toolbar has now been changed too, everything is now grey/red which is more “serious” looking in my opinion.