OT: Google listing w/ category hierarchy

[Jon Davis]

At www.google.com if you search for "download" you get download.com's site
with multiple categories listed out neatly organized as pages within the
site. Many other web sites accomplish this. Does anyone know how it's done?
I don't recognize the categories listed as such in the <meta> tags and
nothing like that is in robots.txt. Anyone have any insight or a link to a
page that discusses this? If I knew what the techinque was called I could
google for it.

Thanks,
Jon

 

[bruce barker \(sqlwork.com\)]

its an ad. download.com pays to have the categories list displayed.

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

 

[Jon Davis]

Really? Think W3C pays for that?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=w3c
... or the IETF?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=ietf
... or idealist.org?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=idealist
... or just about any other major non-profit site that wouldn't likely pay
for special advertising? All of the links above were the first ones I could
come up with.

The structure is completely different from the AdSense and other types of
advertising methods on Google. We pay for Google ads, too, and host them on
our site, but we haven't come across any such advertising. So if you do pay
for it, where is the advertising method detailed on Google.com? (We might
look into it.)

But I'm not convinced it's paid advertising. I'm convinced it must be
related to how Google is spidering these sites (sitemap XML or something?).

Jon