Webmaster Guidelines
Following these guidelines will help
Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to
implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to
pay very close attention to the "Quality Guidelines,"
which outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a
site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has
been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com
or on any of Google's partner sites.
Design and Content Guidelines:
- Make a site with a clear hierarchy and
text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one
static text link.
- Offer a site map to your users with
links that point to the important parts of your site. If the
site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break
the site map into separate pages.
- Create a useful, information-rich
site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe
your content.
- Think about the words users would type
to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually
includes those words within it.
- Try to use text instead of images to
display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler
doesn't recognize text contained in images.
- Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags
are descriptive and accurate.
- Check for broken links and correct
HTML.
- If you decide to use dynamic pages
(i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware
that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as
well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short
and the number of them few.
- Keep the links on a given page to a
reasonable number (fewer than 100).
Technical Guidelines:
- Use a text browser such as Lynx to
examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your
site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript,
cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from
seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine
spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
- Allow search bots to crawl your sites
without session IDs or arguments that track their path through
the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual
user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely
different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete
indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate
URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
- Make sure your web server supports the
If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web
server to tell Google whether your content has changed since
we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you
bandwidth and overhead.
- Make use of the robots.txt file on your
web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or
cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that
you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
to learn how to instruct robots
when they visit your site.
- If your company buys a content
management system, make sure that the system can export your
content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.
- Don't use "&id=" as a
parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our
index.
When your site is ready:
- Have other relevant sites link to
yours.
- Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
- Submit a sitemap as part of our Google
Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google
Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure
of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
- Make sure all the sites that should
know about your pages are aware your site is online.
- Submit your site to relevant
directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as
well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Quality Guidelines - Basic principles:
- Make pages for users, not for search
engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content
to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly
referred to as "cloaking."
- Avoid tricks intended to improve
search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd
feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that
competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does
this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't
exist?"
- Don't participate in link schemes
designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In
particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad
neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be
affected adversely by those links.
- Don't use unauthorized computer programs
to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume
computing resources and violate our Terms
of Service. Google does not recommend the use of
products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic
queries to Google.
Quality Guidelines - Specific
recommendations:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky
redirects.
- Don't send automated queries to Google.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant
words.
- Don't create multiple pages,
subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
- Avoid "doorway" pages
created just for search engines, or other "cookie
cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little
or no original content.
These quality guidelines cover the most
common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may
respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here
(e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known
websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific
deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves
of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of
the basic principles listed above will provide a much better user
experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who
spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.
If you believe that another site is abusing
Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to
problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting.
The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms
that recognize and block future spam attempts.
