Greek Web Masters
Adding a site to Google
by on Mar.05, 2009, under Greek Web Masters
Inclusion in Google’s search results is free and easy; you don’t even need to submit your site to Google. Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as “spiders” to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed in our results aren’t manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.
However, if your site offers specialized products, content, or services (for example, video content, local business info, or product listings), you can reach out to the world by distributing it on Google Web Search. For more information, visit Google Content Central.
To determine whether your site is currently included in Google’s index, do a site: search for your site’s URL. For example, a search for [ site:google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Agoogle.com .
Although Google crawls billions of pages, it’s inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it’s frequently for one of the following reasons:
- The site isn’t well connected through multiple links from other sites on the web.
- The site launched after Google’s most recent crawl was completed.
- The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
- The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site
Our intent is to represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately. To help make this goal a reality, we offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. While there’s no guarantee that our spiders will find a particular site, following these guidelines should increase your site’s chances of showing up in our search results.
Consider creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages. Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.
Website clinic: Call for submissions
by on Feb.20, 2009, under Greek Web Masters
- Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.
- In order to ensure that you’re the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.
- To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets our webmaster quality guidelines. We will be using the same principles as a basis for our analysis.
Spam Report
by on Jan.19, 2009, under Greek Web Masters
Help us maintain the quality of Google search results
We work hard to return the most relevant results for every search we conduct. To that end, we encourage site managers to make their content straightforward and easily understood by users and search engines alike. Unfortunately, not all websites have users’ best interests at heart. Trying to deceive (spam) our web crawler by means of hidden text, deceptive cloaking or doorway pages compromises the quality of our results and degrades the search experience for everyone.
We think that’s a bad thing, and so we request that, if your Google search returns a result that you suspect is spam, you please let us know by using this form. We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammers from our index immediately, so they don’t show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we’ll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.
We appreciate your taking the time to help us improve our service for your fellow users around the world. By helping us eliminate spam, you’re saving millions of people time, effort and energy.
Greel Web Masters
by on Dec.03, 2008, under Greek Web Masters
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 or otherwise penalized. If a site has been penalized, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google’s partner sites.
Design and content guidelines
Technical guidelines
Quality guidelines
When your site is ready:
- Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
- Submit a Sitemap using 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.
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 has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.
- Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.
- 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. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
- Make sure that your <title> elements 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.
- Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.
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 behavior, 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/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.
- Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google’s AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.
- If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.
- 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.
- Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
- Monitor your site’s performance and optimize load times. Google’s goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.
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Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let’s Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.
Quality guidelines
These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, 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.
If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. 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 primarily 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 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 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 with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing 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.
