This is the third in a series of posts examing how SEO will change in 2012. In this post, the focus of attention turns to Google's sitelinks feature.

In 2012, Google is changing the way that sitelinks work. Sitelinks are the small collection of links that appear beneath the top results in some SERPS. Previously the sitelinks were short text links to main pages of the site. This is now changing so that the sitelinks will appear as full sized links with a line of summary text - like a mini version of the google serps. Also, the depth and number of the sitelinks appears to be expanding too, so the sitelinks you will see are more likely to include the most popular pages of a website.

If you want to create sitelinks for your website manually, then you're out of luck. Sitelinks are automatically generated by Google so there is no direct way to create them, however if you want to increase the chances that one of your pages appears in your site's sitelinks, then make sure that there are plenty of on-site and off-site links to these pages. You can however remove sitelinks for pages that you don't want emphesised using the Google Webmaster Tools.