Over the last few days I’ve seen that google is starting to decrease the space where they display sitelinks. Previously sitelinks were displayed for some search phrases, for the first SERP result. They could have up to 4 extra lines, and 8 inner links to other pages on the top result. As you can imagine that having sitelinks for a top keyword would really increase your relative CTR, because of having more options to inner pages and the fact that you have more real esate on google.
Here is an example of the older view, for the keyword “Recruit Ireland”
But now on certain phrases (perhaps more general queries) these site links are compressed on one line.
Site Links Jobs
In this climate the keyword “jobs” is highly sought after, but it’s also possible that it is just too general of a keyword to merit expanded sitelinks.
upon searching for “jobs.ie” you will get the full expanded version of their sitelinks.
Site Link Cars
And here is a further example for a highlight competitive keywords “cars”, on google.ie.
It will be interesting to see how traffic is effected by this recent change by google. It could mean that there will be a higher CTR through to your homepage, as sitelinks are not always shown up so prevalent. For those of you in positions other than first, I would expect that by making sure your keyword description that little bit more appealing you will be able to benefit from this change.
Sitelink Tip
Did you know that you can control your website’s sitelinks on the google webmaster console ? Here you can remove links that you don’t want to appear in your sitelinks.
Recently I was searching for a list of all the regional google domains, and my searching failed. I was interested in seeing just how many regional versions of google, do they offer. Plus it would allow me to update my Google Global Firefox extension with a few more domains. Most people are aware that the version of the Irish Google is located at www.google.ie and that in Germany you can use www.google.de . But what about in Turkmenistan or Rwanda or Jamaica ? Searching a bit more I came across Google’s Langauage Tools page. This is the basis of their translation engine, their listing of what languages you can make google search appear in, and right down the end, a listing of all the Google regional domains.
Ranking on Regional Domains
The regional domains give preference to websites that are related to that region. Things that can influence your standing here include:
- Business address listing in Google and on your webpages.
- Domain name from that specific TLD. i.e. for google.de , using a .DE domain.
- Domain targeting on your Google Webmaster panel.
- Frequency of other locally related links.
- Server location, based on IP address targeting.
Also it is possible that language of a website and keywords in the domain have some lesser effects too.
While most people are aware of Google.com, there are also significant numbers of people using their local version of search. In fact Google will often redirect users to their local version of the search, as they know that the results which appear on regional search is typically more suited to searchers.
The net effect of having regional rankings, is that there can be different results in the SERPS for each version. Logically this makes sense, when someone searches google.ie for mortgages, it’s clear they are only looking for companies related to the Irish market, and the same is true on google.co.uk, etc. And the sensitivity tothe Irish market can be cranked up even more by selecting the “pages from Ireland” option.
For users this is great, but for a SEOs it can mean that we need to check multiple versions of google, to see the regional differences. But of course the positive side is that the competition to rank locally is a lot less 
Listing of Regional Domains
As the format that google provides is rather awkward to use, I decided to put together an excel list, maybe this will be easier for people to use. In all there are 162 regional google domains, which took about 15 minutes to organise into a nice formula. The list can be downloaded from google docs and I will updated it if google adds some more regional sites.
It is also notable that google doesn’t show versions on all it’s domains, i.e. google.us redirects to google.com. And there are even some domains that they don’t own , namely Google.by and Google.cm.
EDIT : Seeing as someone emailed me and pointed out that the google docs version isn’t that easy to use, here is a CSV version of the regional google domains. I hope this works for people a bit better.
A quote from Techcrunch says “Google Continues To Test A Search Interface That Looks More Like Digg Every Day“. Personally I think this is cool, but I wonder how long it will take until it’s over run by spammers, and people trying to unfairly manipulate the results.