Hi,

There are likely to be a number of factors that play a part in this, although there is no rules from Google on how to achieve it. If there were, people would be changing them based on what they want, rather than what Google wants. It is also worth remembering that Google only show these for brand searches, so a strong brand is important.

That said, if I were looking at this myself, I would include the following:

• Clean internal linking structure with good anchor text
• Correctly code your links to ensure they can be fully spidered
• Links to your desired pages
• Pages with a low bounce rate and good organic traffic that already appear in the SERPs for their desired phrase(s)
• Unique page content that is no duplicated anywhere else
• Unique and appropriate page titles and descriptions

There is never any guarantee that you can influence these sitelinks or have Google guarantee a demotion, but follow a bit of best practice, and you might have some success.

-Andy

Rich snippets are what come from HTML markup from the likes of Schema. And yes, there are a number of Wordpress plugins that will allow you to create markup very easily. This will then (hopefully) be used by Google to create rich snippets.

It is confusing at first

-Andy

Rich Snippets Rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries. For example, the snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range; the snippet for a recipe page might show the total preparation time, a photo, and the recipe’s review rating; and the snippet for a music album could list songs along with a link to play each song.
From this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/99170?hl=en

Schema HTML tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.
From this page: http://schema.org/

Rich Snippets are Google's own wording for the snippet of information that can be given to them when using a markup from the likes of Schema.org (Microdata).

I hope that explains this a little?

-Andy

Very welcome Tom - hope all gets sorted.

-Andy

Hi Tom,

The links you refer to are in the Blogroll of the site - something common with Wordpress based sites and generally serve no good purpose.

If they are all like this, you have no idea how they came to be there, and serve no purpose, then the best thing to do (in the event of lack of action when contacting them) is to disavow the sites through Google Webmaster Tools. This will ensure you have nothing more to do with the sites in question and Google will know you want nothing to do with them either.

How they came to be there is anyone's guess, but sounds like they need to be removed.

Are you familiar with disavowing and how it works?

-Andy

--Edit. Updated for typos

Hi,

While it is a possibility, it isn't that likely to be a word in a URL that would trigger a penalty. In what you show above, they don't seem like particularly spammy URL's as they describe what the page is about.

Keyword cannibalisation is more about when you have many site pages that result in more than one trying to rank for the same phrases.

There is a really good post from Rand on this subject here. Well worth a read

-Andy