departments of companies shows on serps

[Ulstrup]

If you do a search for barclays on google the result shows more results from the same domain:

Barclays BankFeatures Barclaycard and an easy to use Internet banking service. All mainstream banking services.
www.barclays.co.uk/ - 21k - Cached - Similar pages

Log-in - More Personal Banking products
Stockbrokers - Manage your accounts online
More results from www.barclays.co.uk »

Anybody knows what triggers this, some companies do have these "departments" listed others don't...

[Gurtie]

an authoratitive result

It only appears where one website is clearly the site which should be number 1 for that search, which is why companies often get it for their own name but not for other searches.

[jimbeetle]

Matt Cutts commented on this (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ui-fun-better-snippets/) back in August. I've looked at it a few times and have sort of a gut feeling that this might be an example of Google using toolbar info, basically using visitor behavior to suss out the links most often followed to decide which four to display.

[rcjordan]

>visitor behavior to suss out the links most often followed

Yeah, G has given some of my local travel-related sites this treatment. While I can't say that it's derived from the toolbar, from my site admin's point of view it certainly appears to correlate to linkpop.

[jimbeetle]

Yeah, guess my ref to the toolbar was just a throwaway there. G has so much data to measure things on it's impossible to figure out where each piece comes from.

[Ulstrup]

Thanks for the input.

Looks like the "departments" don't need to be links on the front page of the company website.

Companies which have these "departments" listed does seem to be picked somehow randomly. I'm curious because one client which is the biggest and probably also best known brand don't have these "depatments" listed while some competitors have.

My first thought was that the name of the company does have the generic term for the branch in the name, but this can't be the case as the Barclays Bank example shows.

[Jochen]

Very interesting to see that google tracks these links (google prefix in URL). Probably indeed connected to visitor behavior.

[Gurtie]

I'd bet good money its the most followed links from the homepage - its true for all of my clients that have them and looks likely to be true for all the other sites I've seen with them (Amazon, BBC, ebay etc).

Which in turn makes it likely it is toolbar feedback driven. That sort of makes sense when I look at the demographics of the customers of sites that have the extra links versus sites which don't, and who got them first - in really broad terms and comparing sites within the same industry, those which tend to have customers in the younger, more techy sectors, or those who are more commonly surfed during the week (so likely to be workplace) got them first, and they're more lkely to be toolbar users. They do also tend to have more visitors but not necessarily from SE's, so I doubt thats the criteria.