Why Google sitelinks does not work with my WordPress website?

Question

I have this XML in my WordPress root directory for a few months now:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
    <url>
        <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-08-10</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>https://example.com/about</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-08-07</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>https://example.com/portfolio</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-08-07</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    </url>
    <url>
        <loc>https://example.com/contact</loc>
        <lastmod>2017-08-07</lastmod>
        <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    </url>
</urlset>

But it does not help on my Google sitelinks at all. I don't see "About", "Portfolio", "Contact" in the Google search result.

Any ideas what else have I missed?

Answer 1

These are three different things:

• Sitemap (the XML you included)
• Google Sitelinks (what you seem to ask about)
• Google Sitelink Searchbox (the tag you used)

A sitemap (following the sitemaps.org protocol) is a file that can help search engines and other consumers to find/crawl all your relevant pages.

Sitelinks are additional links that get displayed with your page’s search result in Google Search. You can’t do anything specific to get them.

Sitelink Searchbox is the search form that gets displayed with your page’s search result in Google Search, typically together with Sitelinks. You can use structured data (Schema.org’s SearchAction type) to power this search form with your site’s own search engine.