Saturday, November 17, 2007

Google Information for Webmasters

Webmaster Guidelines

 

In order to make people more aware of the Google policies, since I work full time online, I am going to share the information below concerning Google's policies.  In pursuing an online seo career, it has been my experience to closely follow these guidelines.  It has also been my unfortunate experience to be witness to many unscrupulous business dealings online.  Let me make my stance very clear.  When I see another company breaking the sacred trust of an seo client, I am fully reminded that I have both the duty and the responsibility to inform other people for whom I work, of the potential dangers that are associated with marketing online.  You must become aware of the fact that there are people online who are here to do nothing but separate you from your hard earned money.  Its simply a fact that we all must become fully aware of.

There are millions of people online at this very moment.  Some are here, like myself, to run a very decent and forthright seo business.  Unfortunately, there are others, who choose to take people's money from them and give them absolutely nothing in return.  In the article below, you will find relevant and insightful information on how to approach Google with your website.  They state it very clearly.  Here is the bottom line.  If you wish to pursue a professional business online, you follow Google's clearcut rules.  It is that simple.  Google is all about everyone having an equal shot at promoting an online business.  There are NO shortcuts, NO workarounds, NO automated systems and definitely NO software programs that you can buy that will give you instant success online.

Quality search engine optimization work requires consistent effort, keyword focus and the all important aspect of never giving up.  If you build a search engine compatible website, build links the right way that lead back to that site, you have a very good chance of getting your information to the places where people will see it.  In my professional opinion, its all about the quality content and the quality of your program that you plan to promote.  If you fall short in either of these areas, you will not see the success that you are striving for.

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).   This number has been reduced to 25...

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 pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
  • 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.

Butch Hamilton-SEO Master-MOM, Predator and Jaguar Marketing Director
806-874-3314
806-205-0648
fax 806-874-0036
http://superior-seo-services.com

  

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