Sitelinks

Sitelinks are the additional links Yandex places under a result to help users reach a section directly. They are generated by the robot; there is no markup that requests them.

How the robot decides

It identifies the most visited sections and generates sitelinks when:

• Page names are short, clear and accurately describe the content. Sitelink text comes from those names, so a menu of “Solutions”, “Resources” and “More” produces sitelinks that tell the user nothing.
• The links come from the site’s own internal links — sitelinks are a product of navigation, not of external references.
• The sections are in the menu, or are the most common clicks from the page the sitelinks are generated for.

Two display forms, four conditions

Sitelinks can appear as ordinary links or as a navigation response, the richer block reserved for a definitive answer. All of these must hold:

• Sitelinks have been generated for the site — check on Display in the search → SERP links.
• The page is in the top 5 results.
• No higher-ranked page already has a navigation response for that query.
• The algorithms consider the page and its sitelinks a relevant answer to the query.

The top-5 condition is the useful one to know: a page at position seven will never show sitelinks however good its navigation is, so this is not the lever to pull for a mid-ranking page.

Why they disappear

On re-crawling, the robot removes a sitelink when it finds a more suitable page, when the site structure changes, or when the conditions are no longer met. A navigation redesign is the usual cause, and the loss shows up as a click-through decline with no change in position.

What you can actually influence

Not the sitelinks themselves, but the three inputs: clear, descriptive section names; a real menu structure the robot can read; and internal linking that reflects how visitors actually move through the site. Sitelinks are downstream of navigation quality, which is why they cannot be requested.