For quite a while now, observant Google users have noticed that the first search result in Google's organic listings have had some extra links attached to them. The links tend to lead to the most popular sub-pages of a site as a sort of short-cut for searchers. For example, a movie theatre might include quick links to showtimes and ticket sales and a business listing might include links to job postings and store locations. Despite the fact that these listings have been showing up for awhile now, Google has only officially given them a name today. Playing a hand from the "obvious" deck, they decided to dub them Sitelinks.

You can see an example of Sitelinks in action in the image below.

According to the team at Google, Sitelinks are assigned automatically.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn't allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don't think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user's query, we won't show them.

What's interesting to business owners is that it implies that there will be specific ways that you can build your site that will make it more likely that these types of advanced listings will appear for your site. There are obvious benefits to this type of listing, so it will certainly be a worthwhile thing for the industry to start digging into.