| Google Guide.
How can I improve
my site's ranking?
(Extract taken from Google search engine)
A sites' positions in our search results are determined automatically
based on a number of factors, which are explained in more detail
at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html. We don't manually
assign keywords to sites, nor do we manipulate the ranking of any
site in our search results.
In general, webmasters can improve the rank
of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that
link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's
visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing
our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining
a Google-friendly web site.
Why does my site
have a PageRank of zero?
A page may be assigned a rank of zero if Google crawls very few
sites that link to it. Additionally, pages recently added to the
Google index may also show a PageRank score of zero because they
haven't been crawled by Googlebot yet and haven't been ranked. A
page's PageRank score may increase naturally with subsequent crawls,
so this shouldn't be a cause for concern. To learn more about PageRank,
please see http://www.google.com/technology/index.html
Will switching
hosting companies or changing my IP address affect my listing
in Google?
As long as your URL stays the same, your site's listing in Google
shouldn't be affected if you switch hosting companies or change
your IP address. We recommend migrating a site to a new IP address
with the following steps:
1. Bring a copy of your site up at the new IP address.
2. Update your nameserver to point to the new IP address.
3. Once you see search engine spiders fetch pages from the new IP
address (typically within 24-48 hours), it's safe to take down the
copy of your site at the old IP address.
What can I do
if I'm afraid my competitor is harming my ranking in Google?
There's almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking
or have your site removed from our index. If you're concerned about
another site linking to yours, we suggest contacting the webmaster
of the site in question. Google aggregates and organizes information
published on the web; we don't control the content of these pages.
Our search results change regularly as we update our index. While
we can't guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our
index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines for
maintaining a "crawler-friendly" site. Following these
recommendations may increase the likelihood that your site will
show up consistently in the Google search results.
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, content,
and technical guidelines
Quality guidelines
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 Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure
of your site and to increase our coverage of your web pages.
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.
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 robots 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 robots is entirely
different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete
indexing of your site, as robots may not be able to eliminate
URL's 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 Sitemaps.
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.
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 web sites). 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.
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.
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 web site 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 neighbourhoods" 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 guidelines
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.
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 a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines,
it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site
doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that
it does and request re inclusion.
How can
I create a Google-friendly site?
Our 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 measure 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 to determine its PageRank, 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." Please
note that ranking of sites in our search results is completely automated,
and we don't manually assign keywords to sites.
Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish
natural links from unnatural links. Natural backward
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.
Consider creating static copies of dynamic
pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they
comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that
your dynamically generated pages (such as URL's containing
question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you
might create static copies of these pages. If you create static
copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt
file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.
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
optimisation 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
tags 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 URL's. 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. |
