How to help Google find, index and rank your website

Nov 16, 2006 09:22 GMT  ·  By

Google is a search engine that attracts an important part of web developers to register their site for including it in the page rank and index. So, before deciding to send your link to Google you must know that there are some guidelines to help you improve your site and pagerank.

The company sustains that you must "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.'" It is a very important statement because if you intend to use tricks to increase the position in Google's ranks, you can be removed from Google's index and no longer show up in Google Search results. They created a special rule to increase the importance of this aspect: "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?'"

Related to the technical guidelines, Google mentioned that you must "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."

If you're interested in Google Guidelines, you can search the Internet for more information or visit this page to read the official rules.