Google has decided to drop the sitelinks demotion feature from Google Search Console. On 13th Oct’16, Google announced on Google Plus that they are removing the 9-year-old feature from Google Search Console to simplify things.
Then what should the webmaster do with sitelinks they want to demote? For this, Google suggests three best practices:
- Provide clear structure, use relevant internal links and anchor text that might be useful for the user
- Let Google crawl and index important pages on your site
- Remove your page entirely, you can use “no index” robots (meta tag)
First introduced on 18th Oct’07, the feature was shut down yesterday. The feature let webmaster inform Google if it doesn’t want a specific URL to show up on the sitelinks section in Google search results.
Our take :
Sitelink demotion tool was pretty useful. We could never choose which sitelinks to display on Google Search Results. At least, an option to demote the unwanted sitelink on brand searches came in handy. Not a great move from Google.
Source: https://goo.gl/NiuOq0
