[Support request] Google Sitelinks Not Working When Page Header Enabled

[Rylan Urban]

I’m gonna need the help of Tom on this one…

Not sure if you’re aware, but Google Sitelinks are not working when Page Header is enabled on the front page of Generate Press websites.

I had a site that just lost the feature… then I did some research into my sites and found the pattern:

http://solarsellmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Page-Header-issue.png

Please get back to me for discussion / ideas. It’s an important feature but there appears to be some coding that’s interfering with Google’s crawlers.

Rylan

[Tom]

Hi Rylan,

All the page header does is add an element below your header – same as adding any kind of element in there, nothing special at all.

Inserting an element like this on your page wouldn’t stop Google from showing site links as far as I know (why would it?) – it reads the page header the same as any other element on the page (site header, sidebar, content). Site links are based on a whole bunch of different factors, which you can find by Googling them. Things like having a sitemap, internal linking, external linking etc..

If you can find any research on why adding an element like page header would cause something like this to happen, I would love to study it 🙂

[Rylan Urban]

Hey Tom, I’m aware about how Google does it.

It’s just strange the pattern that I picked up – it’s consistent across all my sites (using generate press)… and for one of them (Roots Rock Solar) I added page header and it suddenly lost the sitelinks.

[Rylan Urban]

(those are all my sites in the image… all with generate press). I have many more with page header activated – no sitelinks. The only two that have them are not using page-header.

[Tom]

Been reading more about this.

Apparently changing the structure of your website can make site links disappear until Google re-crawls your site and finds the important links again. That’s a possibility?

I can’t find anything about having an element like page header causing them not to show up. If you do a search you’ll find lots of information about what Google looks for to create site links.

Obviously it would be a big problem if Page Header was causing Google not to use them, I just can’t find any reason whatsoever why that would happen. The page header element has the same structure as any other element, just like the .site-header, .container etc.. There’s nothing unique about it except it can have a background image/video.

[Rylan Urban]

Yeah I agree,

I’m not sure what’s going one here!

I’ll let it go on for another few months and let you know If any changes in the patter occur. I may even reverse a page-header site to see if sitelinks resolve.

Thanks,

Rylan!

[Tom]

Sounds good – I’ll keep an eye out as well 🙂

[Author]

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