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Google Guidelines – What you need to know!

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You have created a stellar website, you’ve worked hard, maybe even paid a pretty penny to have it optimized, but have you given much thought to Google’s most important and crucial rules? Google rules are constantly changing, so make it a practice to stay in the know. Following Google’s guidelines closely will help ensure that your website can be found, ranked, and indexed by Google. If you don’t play by the rules, your site could be impacted by an algorithmic or manual spam action, which will result in your site no longer showing up on Google.com or any of Google’s partner sites. Think you can get around the rules with some tricky footwork? Think again. Your site can be removed entirely, without warning, if you use illicit practices! If you’re just not sure of the most up-to-date rules, don’t worry; I’ve got you covered. Keep these eight simple rules in mind and you’ll be safe.

1. First Things First

When your site is ready to be published, submit it to Google http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/. Use Google Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap so that Google can learn about the structure of your site and to increase coverage of your webpages. This will ensure that all the sites that should know about your pages are aware that your site is online.

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2. Design and Content Guidelines

Having a clear hierarchy and text links are essential elements to be able to get picked up. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Important parts of your site will stand out if you provide a site map to your users with links that point to the most significant parts of the site. You can always break the site map into multiple pages if the site map has a particularly large number of links, but remember to keep links to a realistic number.

Content should be useful and your pages should describe your content clearly and accurately. In an effort for your users to find your pages, determine the words that people would search on to find your site and include those words within your pages.

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3. Technical Suggestions

The Google crawler does not recognize text contained in images, so if you have to use images for textual content, Google suggests using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text and be sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and make any corrections to HTML that is needed.

It’s important to note that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. If you’re using dynamic pages, it helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

4. Technical Guidelines

  • Use Lynx as a text browser.
  • Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs.
  • Your web server should support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. If any of your content has changed since Google last crawled it, this feature will tell Google that there have been updates.
  • Go to: http://code.google.com/web/controlcrawlindex/docs/faq.html to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site and make sure you are using it correctly.
  • Make sure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For instance, Google’s AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.
  • If using a content management system, check to make sure the system is creating pages and links that search engines can crawl.
  • Make sure that your site is appearing correctly in different browsers by testing your site.
  • Improve your site by monitoring its performance and optimize load times. This will do everyone a favor! If you need help with this, Google suggests using Page Speed, YSlow or WebPagetest. Tools that show the speed of your website, check out Let’s Make The Web Faster or visit the Site Performance tool in the Webmaster Tools in Google Help Center.

5. Basic Quality Guidelines

Create pages for users, not for search engines. Avoid tricks intended to improve your search rankings and don’t deceive your users.  Your content will help you improve your search ranking, so make it unique, valuable, and engaging.

 6. Specific Quality Guidelines

     Here’s what NOT to do:

  • Avoid automatically generated content.
  • Do not participate in link schemes.
  • Cloaking.
  • Sneaky redirects.
  • Hidden text or links.
  • Doorway pages.
  • Scrapped content.
  • Do not participate in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value.
  • Loading pages with irrelevant keywords.
  • Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other badware.
  • Abusing rich snippets markup.
  • Sending automated queries to Google.

 7. Good Practices to Follow

  • Monitor your site for hacking and remove hacked content as soon as it appears.
  • Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site.

8. Remedy Violations

If your site has violated any of these guidelines, remedy the problem as soon as possible and submit your site for reconsideration.

Matthew Toren
 

Matthew Toren is a serial entrepreneur, mentor, investor and co-founder of YoungEntrepreneur.com. He is co-author, with his brother Adam, of Kidpreneurs.org, BizWarriors.com and Small Business, BIG Vision: Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right (Wiley).

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