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When the Google search empire first began, they would just list out all the sites relevant to your search, with a small description of each page under the title. This fueled the development of SEO best practices, including that meta titles and descriptions not only accurately describe the features of a site but also that they do so succinctly, or risk being cut off mid-way (somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 characters for meta descriptions). Then as Google got smarter (as if that was possible), they listed 2-4 popular pages for the top ranking site directly under the site’s home page. These sitelinks meant that you could conveniently access pages within the site right from the search results, rather than clicking through the site to find the page you wanted.

Back in August, Google quietly made changes to these sitelinks. Now, Google shows full-size extended sitelinks – up to twelve of them! One repercussion is that other, lower-ranking sites may now be pushed almost to the fold or even below. This, in turn, can have a very real impact on search click-through rate.

Searchers must now scroll down to find additional queries. Many searchers are inherently lazy…if a top ranking site has played its SEO cards right and carefully tailored meta data to attract potential visitors, searchers may now have no reason to scroll down below the initial result! It’s easy to see how these highest-ranking sites have now been given an incredible advantage by the Google engine.

The search giant has argued that this change makes searching the web more stream-lined for searchers, because all results from one company will now be grouped into one place, rather than scattered throughout the search results. While it’s true that this may allow more and varied links to appear on the first page of results, the amount of space competitors will have to cede to the top-ranking site cannot be understated.

While this has huge repercussions for lower-ranking sites, the move may also be game-changing for the lucky sites on top, as well as any marketers hoping to eventually earn that coveted spot. As you can see from the screen shot above, the inclusion of eight rather than four or fewer sub-pages now means that meta-descriptions are truncated even further to almost nothing. Carefully written meta-descriptions that were successful before the change may now be less effective. This provides even more reason to frontload descriptions and titles with your important keywords and to make every character count, or you’ll risk losing out on click-throughs to other, more descriptive sites.

Whatever the effect this has on your company, whether good or bad, it’s clear that the game has changed. And, as with anything in SEO, you’ll have to make sure to change with it, or risk getting left behind.