Google's New Expanded Sitelinks

When Google recently launched Google+ they commented that it would be one of hundreds of changes that would be rolled out over coming months.

We may have seen another one of those changes today with new expanded sitelinks now showing for branded queries.  There was a fairly major update around August 2010 that gave businesses the possibility to take up more than just the first couple of listings for queries related to their brand and there have been a number of smaller brand-biased changes at Google since then.  They seem to be continuing that trend with this change to the way sitelinks are being displayed.

Early discussions around this development indicate that the sub-pages being shown in the results are a mix of high authority pages on the site and those that are being shared/liked on the major social media sites including of course Google +1s.

With so many changes coming from Google at the moment it feels like a turbulent time in our industry but it's important to recognize that the fundamentals are much the same and in fact Google are doing everything they can to reward quality content.  So if there's a take-away from all this it has to be that great content must be the foundation to both your SEO and social media activities.