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The following guidelines are courtesy of Google

Webmaster Guidelines

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 tags and ALT attributes 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 behaviour, 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. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
  • 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.
  • Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.
Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behaviour, 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 will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

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 Google's 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 guidelines

  • Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
  • Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
  • Don't send automated queries to Google.
  • Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
  • Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
  • Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
  • Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
  • If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

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 webmaster tools. Google 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.
There are myriad sites on the internet who can advise you about your website, hosting and ranking. If you require any further information or guidance with your website, feel free to call us on 01530 566090, we're always available for an informal chat and we have the knowledge and the desire to help you reach your ambitions and objectives. We can also direct you to companies we have formed lasting professional partnerships with, from web site designers such as Best Web Design Agency and Tempest Web Design, to ecommerce specialists who can assist with selling your goods online, such as Ecommerce Design Specialists.

Cloaking

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.

Some examples of cloaking include:
  • Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users.
  • Serving different content to search engines than to users.
If your site contains elements that aren't crawlable by search engines (such as Flash, Javascript, or images), you shouldn't provide cloaked content to search engines. Rather, you should consider visitors to your site who are unable to view these elements as well. For instance:
  • Provide alt text that describes images for visitors with screen readers or images turned off in their browsers.
  • Provide the textual contents of Javascript in a noscript tag.
Ensure that you provide the same content in both elements (for instance, provide the same text in the Javascript as in the noscript tag). Including substantially different content in the alternate element may cause Google to take action on the site.

Sneaky Javascript redirects

When Googlebot indexes a page containing Javascript, it will index that page but it cannot follow or index any links hidden in the Javascript itself. Use of Javascript is an entirely legitimate web practice. However, use of Javascript with the intent to deceive search engines is not. For instance, placing different text in Javascript than in a noscript tag violates our webmaster guidelines because it displays different content for users (who see the Javascript-based text) than for search engines (which see the noscript-based text). Along those lines, it violates the webmaster guidelines to embed a link in Javascript that redirects the user to a different page with the intent to show the user a different page than the search engine sees. When a redirect link is embedded in Javascript, the search engine indexes the original page rather than following the link, whereas users are taken to the redirect target. Like cloaking, this practice is deceptive because it displays different content to users and to Googlebot, and can take a visitor somewhere other than where they intended to go.

Note that placement of links within Javascript is alone not deceptive. When examining Javascript on your site to ensure your site adheres to Google's guidelines, consider the intent.

Keep in mind that since search engines generally can't access the contents of Javascript, legitimate links within Javascript will likely be inaccessible to them (as well as to visitors without Javascript-enabled browsers). You might instead keep links outside of Javascript or replicate them in a noscript tag.

Doorway pages

Doorway pages are pages specifically made for search engines. Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content. HTML sitemaps are a valuable resource for your visitors, but ensure that these pages of links are easy for your visitors to navigate. If you have a number of links to include, consider organizing them into categories or into multiple pages. But in doing so, ensure that they are intended for visitors to navigate the sections of your site, and not simply for search engines.

Google's aim is to give users the most valuable and relevant search results. They frown on practices that are designed to manipulate search engines and deceive users by directing them to sites other than the ones they selected and that provide content solely for the benefit of search engines. Sites making use of these practices may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in Google search results.

Keyword stuffing

"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

To fix this problem, review your site for misused keywords. Typically, these will be lists or paragraphs of keywords, often randomly repeated. Check carefully, because keywords can often be in the form of hidden text, or they can be hidden in title tags or alt attributes.

Once you've made your changes and are confident that your site no longer violates Google's webmaster guidelines, submit your site for reconsideration.

Guidelines courtesy of Google.
 
 
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