Unfortunately, we have no full control of how is our website showing on the Google’s search results pages. Let’s pretend you have a website and on the first stage you have built just a landing page for it which was supposed to be a temporary “placeholder” until you would have your main pages as your services, the blog page and the page that tells visitors about your company. Now when these pages are implemented and active, Google continues to show the temporary landing page and not the actual ones. How to tell Google what pages to show?
Google does everything possible for the users to find the information they are looking for. To achieve this goal the search engine displays organic sitelinks. These are four smaller links displayed under the meta description of the main listing. This is implemented to help the users to instantly reach the page they are looking for. But sometimes even Google’s algorithms are slow when it comes to updating your website’s link. What can you do in such cases?
The main problem here is that the process is fully automated. It means that the website owner or the team that supports it cannot manually remove a sitelink from the Google search. In February 2022 Google has told that this feature can be implemented sometime. But before the new feature release there are some things that you can do to help Google pay attention to the main links you want to be shown.
One of the best practices is using more informative page titles. Instead of naming your page “Services” try to identify what type of services do you offer? If it’s a web-development, then you can name your page “Web-Development Services” so that Google will better “understand” what is your page about and will pull it over the temporary one.
Google pays attention to the structure of every website. It looks at the internal links to find the fastest way to a possible question of a user.
Anchor text is the visible and clickable text which is being shown in front of the link. You may use a tool to manually crawl your website and look at the internal links. Maybe there will be one forwarding to the webpage you do not wish to be shown. If such a link exists, then you just have to update the anchor text and the link. Then you can resubmit it in Search Console and wait till Google will crawl your new link.
If nothing worked, the emergency solution can be removing the unwanted page from your website or adding a “Noindex” tag in your website’s Robots.txt. By doing this you will ask Google not to consider that page and it will be removed from the index.
If you are not familiar with all of this, the best option for you will be to hire an experienced SEO agency and ask them to fix this.
As you saw, web developers still have no direct control over the sitelinks that are being shown or hide on SERP. Eventually there are some more complicated methods to achieve that.
