How are sitelinks generated?

Matt's answer:

Matt Cutts: Today’s question comes from Mohamed in Ottawa, Canada and Mohamed wants to know, “When you search for something, let’s say “LinkedIn”, you will notice there are some quick links on the search results such as “Jobs, About, Advanced” etc, how does that work? Assuming my website is number one on the search results, how can I do that?” Well, we’ve covered this a little bit before but the fact that you asked means that not everybody knows. S so let’s just do a quick review. Those are called “sitelinks” and we show sitelinks whenever we think that they might be especially helpful for someone who’s already doing that navigational query. So, for example, you mentioned the query “LinkedIn”. If I do that, I’ll see things like “Groups, Oopen Jobs, LinkedIn Jobs, Company Directory, About LinkedIn”, stuff like that. The way that we compute that is algorithmic. There’s no person saying, “W we think this is going to be the best link”. A, and in fact if we do a bad job and compute links that you would not like to have, you can remove sitelinks in Google’s webmaster console. So, the main thing to know is that it typically triggers whenever it’s a navigational search;  — that is a search that’s going to return the website that you’re searching for at number one –. iIt is algorithmic. There’s nobody, you know, manually saying what the link should be or anything like that. If you don’t get the sitelinks, then you might just want to wait and be a little patient. Make sure that enough people know about your website. You want to be a reputable website and you want people to find out about your website because we don’t do it for every single query. We do it when we believe it’s useful for users and we have data to support that fact. So, you know, if you are already number one, which it sounds like you are, you’re in relatively good shape. With any luck at all, you might get sitelinks over time.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: