Posts Tagged ‘FAQ’

How can I create a Google-friendly site?

Friday, February 1st, 2008


     How can I create a Google-friendly site? 

Things to doOur 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 forProvide 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 yoursLinks 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 view 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 as part of its PageRank assessment, 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.”Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural 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 accessibleBuild 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 URLs 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 AvoidDon’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 optimization 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 attributes 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 URLs. 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.

None of this is mine.. Every thing is from google 

 

Googles FAQ About Sitemap´s

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

Last month, Trevor spoke on the Sitemaps: Oversold, Misused or On The Money? panel at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago. After receiving a lot of great questions at the conference in addition to all the feedback we receive in our Help Group, we’ve pulled together a FAQ:

  • Q: I submitted a Sitemap, but my URLs haven’t been [crawled/indexed] yet. Isn’t that what a Sitemap is for?
  • A: Submitting a Sitemap helps you make sure Google knows about the URLs on your site. It can be especially helpful if your content is not easily discoverable by our crawler (such as pages accessible only through a form). It is not, however, a guarantee that those URLs will be crawled or indexed. We use information from Sitemaps to augment our usual crawl and discovery processes. Learn more.
  • Q: If it doesn’t get me automatically crawled and indexed, what does a Sitemap do?
  • A: Sitemaps give information to Google to help us better understand your site. This can include making sure we know about all your URLs, how often and when they’re updated, and what their relative importance is. Also, if you submit your Sitemap via Webmaster Tools, we’ll show you stats such as how many of your Sitemap’s URLs are indexed. Learn more.
  • Q: Will a Sitemap help me rank better?
  • A: A Sitemap does not affect the actual ranking of your pages. However, if it helps get more of your site crawled (by notifying us of URLs we didn’t previously didn’t know about, and/or by helping us prioritize the URLs on your site), that can lead to increased presence and visibility of your site in our index. Learn more.
  • Q: If I set all of my pages to have priority 1.0, will that make them rank higher (or get crawled faster) than someone else’s pages that have priority 0.8?
  • A: No. As stated in our Help Center, “priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.” Indicating that all of your pages have the same priority is the same as not providing any priority information at all.
  • Q: Is there any point in submitting a Sitemap if all the metadata (<changefreq>, <priority>, etc.) is the same for each URL, or if I’m not sure it’s accurate?
  • A: If the value of a particular tag is the same for 100% of the URLs in your Sitemap, you don’t need to include that tag in your Sitemap. Including it won’t hurt you, but it’s essentially the same as not submitting any information, since it doesn’t help distinguish between your URLs. If you’re not sure whether your metadata is accurate (for example, you don’t know when a particular URL was last modified), it’s better to omit that tag for that particular URL than to just make up a value which may be inaccurate.
  • Q: I’ve heard about people who submitted a Sitemap and got penalized shortly afterward. Can a Sitemap hurt you?
  • A: Only if it falls on you from a great height. (Seriously, though: if it ever happened that someone was penalized after submitting a Sitemap, it would have been purely coincidental. Google does not penalize you for submitting a Sitemap.)
  • Q: Where can I put my Sitemap? Does it have to be at the root of my site?
  • A: We recently enabled Sitemap cross-submissions, which means that you can put your Sitemap just about anywhere as long as you have the following sites verified in yourWebmaster Tools account:
  • the site on which the Sitemap is located
  • the site(s) whose URLs are referenced in the Sitemap

Note that cross-submissions may not work for search engines other than Google. Learn more about Sitemap cross-submissions

  • Q: Can I just submit the site map that my webmaster made of my site? I don’t get this whole XML thing.
  • A: There’s a difference between a (usually HTML) site map built to help humans navigate around your site, and an XML Sitemap built for search engines. Both of them are useful, and it’s great to have both. A site map on your domain can also help search engines find your content (since crawlers can follow the links on the page). However, if you submit an HTML site map in place of a Sitemap, Webmaster Tools will report an error because an HTML page isn’t one of our recognized Sitemap formats. Also, if you create an XML Sitemap, you’ll be able to give us more information than you can with an HTML site map (which is just a collection of links). Learn more about supported Sitemap formats.
  • Q: Which Sitemap format is the best?
  • A: We recommend the XML Sitemap protocol as defined by sitemaps.org. XML Sitemaps have the advantage of being upgradeable: you can start simple if you want (by just listing your URLs), but—unlike a text file Sitemap—you can easily upgrade an XML Sitemap later on to include more metadata. XML Sitemaps are also more comprehensive than an Atom or RSS feed submitted as a Sitemap, since feeds usually only list your most recent URLs (rather than all the URLs you want search engines to know about).
  • Q: If I have multiple URLs that point to the same content, can I use my Sitemap to indicate my preferred URL for that content?
  • A: Yes. While we can’t guarantee that our algorithms will display that particular URL in search results, it’s still helpful for you to indicate your preference by including that URL in your Sitemap. We take this into consideration, along with other signals, when deciding which URL to display in search results. 

 Learn more about duplicate content

  • Q: Does the placement of a URL within a Sitemap file matter? Will the URLs at the beginning of the file get better treatment than the URLs near the end?
  • A: No, and no.
  • Q: If my site has multiple sections (e.g. a blog, a forum, and a photo gallery), should I submit one Sitemap for the site, or multiple Sitemaps (one for each section)?
  • A: You may submit as few or as many Sitemaps as you like (up to these limits). Organize them in whatever way you find easiest to maintain. If you create multiple Sitemaps, you can use a Sitemap Index file to list them all. Learn more.

 

  • If your question isn’t covered here, you can find even more questions and answers in our  Sitemaps Help Group.