Recently I redesigned the site and moved the blog into a subdirectory — a fairly big change. I expected the index to roll back, but by accident I triggered Google Sitelink, a pleasant surprise. Baidu Baike says this is the highest state of Google ranking, yet I know nothing about SEO — well, maybe a little, but I’m not an SEO person and don’t focus on it; my blog isn’t about SEO optimization either.
Some friends may wonder what I did. Let me explain my redesign goals and what I changed. I’m not an SEO person, so this is for reference only, not an official explanation.
First, the domain age is 3 months and 19 days — not an old domain, still quite new. Of course the previous domain was two years old and I set up a 301 redirect. At first the homepage was just the blog. First, I felt it was too single-purpose — what if I wanted other sections later? Second, the blog has all kinds of content, so the homepage keywords were a mess. So I decided to move the blog as one feature into a second-level directory and make a new homepage. The old themes were made by others and I didn’t know the page structure, so I decided to build my own — I understand my pages better that way.
So when building the page myself I kept it clear — where the header is, where the menu is, where the footer is, and so on — then described “Renfei” on the page to raise keyword density. When Google considers this site the most authoritative source for that result, it triggers Google Sitelink to improve user experience.
So a clear, simple site structure and a clear page structure, plus a bit of microdata, is even better. Use Google Search Console often and well, and follow Google’s help and recommendations.
Also, when writing pages, tags matter too. For example, the h1 title is the main heading — a page should have at most one. h2 is next, several are fine but not too many; h3 can be more. Heading tags tell search engines the page’s main topic, but don’t overuse them. If most of your page is h1, the search engine may dislike it because the content looks messy rather than focused, and might even consider it cheating — over-optimization that leads to a ranking penalty.
Page keywords should be few and precise; the description should briefly state what the page is about. Don’t pile up keywords — too much backfires. I didn’t care about SEO, yet by accident triggered Google Sitelink. In the end the most effective thing is to publish your own content; if nowhere else has it but you do, you’re naturally authoritative.