14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been a big fan of sitelinks lately. It expanded their use in organic search results and it is now adding a new ad unit with three lines of sitelinks, six links in total.
These types of ads only show up if Google is very confident that they're exactly what the user searched for, but when they do, they tend to stand out, which is the point in the first place.
Sitelinks are sections and pages within a site that are sometimes highlighted in search results, or in ads, to enable users to go directly to that section directly rather than have to navigate through the site.
The same idea led to sitelinks in ads, they enable users to get exactly where they want to arrive by passing the homepage or a more general category.
There have been sitelinks in ads before, but Google showed two lines at the most. While the number of lines has grown, therefore the size of the ad, there are some strict requirements before sitelinks will be included in an ad.
"Three-line and two-line formats: Sitelinks are designed to trigger in situations where an ad provides the ideal answer for a search query. These ads are most likely to trigger on unique brand terms," Google explains.
"One-line format: Sitelinks will trigger with more generic terms, but may also include brand terms," it adds, in a help page.
"Embedded format: Sitelinks will trigger whenever your ad qualifies to appear above the search results and the text in your ad exactly matches one or more of your Sitelinks," it continues.
Of course, for sitelinks to show up in ads, the website has to be properly configured for Google to discover and index them. Google is emphasizing sitelinks lately, it has recently made some changes enabling some searches to display a lot more sitelinks for the same site than before. [via Search Engine Land]