Google's
webmaster guidelines provide general design, technical, and quality
guidelines. Below are more detailed tips for creating a Google-friendly site.
Give visitors the information they're looking for...
Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is
the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information,
their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your
site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and
accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find
your pages and include those words on your site.
Make sure that other sites link to yours...
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility
in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines
PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching
techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search.
Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank
assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for
page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily
and help to make other pages "important."
Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural
links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature
of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be
helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links to your site are placed there
specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines. Some of
these types of links (such as link schemes and doorway pages) are covered in our
webmaster guidelines.
Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.
Make your site easily accessible...
Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable
from at least one static text link.
Use a text browser, such as
Lynx, to examine your
site. Most spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If features such as
JavaScript, cookies, session IDs,
frames, DHTML, or
Macromedia Flash keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser,
then spiders may have trouble crawling it.
Things to avoid...
Don't fill your page with lists of keywords, attempt to "cloak" pages, or put
up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you
don't intend visitors to see, Google considers those links and pages deceptive
and may ignore your site.
Don't feel obligated to purchase a
search engine optimization service. Some companies claim to "guarantee" high
ranking for your site in Google's search results. While legitimate consulting
firms can improve your site's flow and content, others employ deceptive tactics
in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated
with one of these deceptive services, it could be banned from our index.
Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler
doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main
content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.
Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer
text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as
the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is
included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders
using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please
visit
our information on blocking Googlebot.
Other Resources:
May you be graced with spiders soon!
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