Sitelinks give users a choice of destinations on your website that they can visit directly from your text ads. Hopefully you’ve already been using sitelinks to improve your Adwords campaign performance; and if so – make sure to pay close attention to Google’s Adwords Sitelinks policy so you do not run the risk of being penalized. If you aren’t advertising with Google Adwords yet – our $100 Adwords Credit Giveaway is a great chance to get started!
Now the existing policy has always required that each sitelink in a campaign link to a different landing page. That means a user would have a meaningfully different experience on the landing page from each sitelink. Recently, though, Google has noticed an increase in the number of sitelinks created with the same landing page URLs or identical content. So starting September 24th, the team at Google is starting a more proactive enforcement of the policy.
They’ll initially focus on new sitelinks and any sitelinks that you have recently changed. As your ads are being served, their systems will verify that your sitelinks meet the policy standards. Sitelinks that don’t meet the standards will be restricted from appearing.
We all realize that manually checking and fixing duplicates among your existing sitelinks and landing pages might take some time. So luckily Google is delaying proactive enforcement with existing sitelinks for a few months. But don’t wait until the last minute. And remember, any sitelink that you add or change will be subject to proactive enforcement right away.