Back in 2007 Google added a feature to Search Console, back then known as Webmaster Tools, to allow webmasters to “demote” or remove specific URLs as sitelinks from showing up in the search results snippets.
Sitelinks are the popular links you find in Google search results under some of the snippets. Here what I boxed in, in red, are the sitelinks for this search snippet:
So if I felt the “about us” link is something that is not worth showing as a sitelink, I would have been able to tell Google – ignore that one and replace it with your next runner up. I cannot longer do that.
Google posted this news on Google+ this morning saying “our algorithms have gotten much better at finding, creating, and showing relevant sitelinks, and so we feel it’s time to simplify things.” So they decided internally to remove the demote sitelinks feature to simplify things.
It was actually a feature I used every now and then, so I am a bit surprised they dropped it. Google added this:
John Mueller of Google posted about this on Twitter as well and he is taking some heat for the decision.
Do you feel that this is a bad move by Google?
