As we reported a few weeks ago, Google removed the Sitelinks demotion tool from the Google Search Console.

But did you know that the tool did not work for about 6-months prior to that? So since around April 2016, if you tried to demote a sitelink using that tool – it may have not worked.

John Mueller of Google said this in this mornings webmaster hangout on YouTube at the 5:17 mark into the video. He said “the effect of this tool has been dialed down to almost nothing in the last half year or so.” He added that “if you have been using this tool to kind of maintain your sitelinks, then probably we haven’t been taking the input from your submissions there into account and we have been using our algorithms anyway.”

Here is the video embed:

Here is the transcript:

Forum discussion at Google+.