What is Sitelinks Search Box?
Its an auto loaded search box which display relevant results for your website. When some users search with some keyword or post Google algorithms recognize it and display the correct search result for the input keyword. They also display a bunch of sitelinks with search box below the search result. If you need more details here check out the official Google Developers page. As seen on Google developers page, the sitelinks search box appears only for navigational queries and for relevant users. While the box appearing Google algorithms uses many factors such as detail of the website and type of navigation queries from the readers.
The above image shows, the box has been moved above the sitelinks in the snippet. While the users type the keyword, the auto-complete results have been added to the search results.
Set Up Site Search Box In Google Search Results
#1 Adding a Search Engine
As Google Algorithms checks out the search queries from the users you need to set up your website with Google Custom Search Engine before. Though the search box direct the users to search result page on your page you need to add perhaps to enable this feature. So if you don’t have before then set up with Google Custom Search Engine now.
#2 Put the schema.org markup on Homepage
Schema.org markup should refer your website search queries in the target property of SearchAction. The URL pattern should point to the same domain where the domain was hosted and been searched. In addition, you’ll want to make sure that the URL pattern with the placeholder replaced by an actual query yields a valid search results page on your site. The below markup are the example in Microdata,
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/WebSite”> <meta itemprop=”url” content=”https://www.example.com/”/> <form itemprop=”potentialAction” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/SearchAction”> <meta itemprop=”target” content=”https://www.example.com/search?q={search_term}”/> <input itemprop=”query-input” type=”text” name=”search_term” required/> <input type=”submit”/> </form> </div>
#3 Waiting for the Approval
Wait for Google Search algorithms to identify your site as a candidate for the new sitelinks search box.
Guidelines for using Sitelinks Search Box
- Make sure that your server supports UTF-8 character encoding.
- Try to Prevent crawling of your site’s search results pages with robots.txt.
- Set a canonical URL for your domain’s homepage.
- Add the markup on the homepage of your site.
- Use JSON-LD or Micro-data.
Summary
Do your blog have Sitelinks Search Box? Do you feel this post is informative or not? If yes, then do comments and share this article with your friends. For more information about the Sitelinks search box check the official developers page. Cheers♥♥