Google Website Guidelines

Google Guidelines

Following are some of the important google guidelines, tips and tricks that can be employed while dealing with Google:

Google Recommended:
• A website should have crystal clear hierarchy and links and should preferably be easy to navigate.
• A site map is required to help the users go around yoursite and in case the site map has more than 100 links,then it is advisable to break it into several pages to avoid clutter.
• Come up with essential and precise keywords and make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.
• The Google crawler will not recognize text hidden in the images, so when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain text.
• The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive and accurate and the website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML.
Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’ character) should be kept to a minimum as not every search engine spider is able to crawl them.
• The robots.txt file on your web server should be current and should not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be
crawled.

Google NOT Recommended:
• When making a site, do not cheat your users, i.e. those people who will surf your website. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or present them with any
fraudulent schemes.
• Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking.
• Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links.
• Google frowns upon websites using cloaking technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that.
• Automated queries should not be sent to Google.
• Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and content. Also don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with significantly duplicate content.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines
or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any original content.