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 is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

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 does not 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 (ie, 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.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.
Technical guidelines back to top

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 crawler 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 can not be crawler. Make sure it’s current for your site so that you do not 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.

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 do not add much value for users coming from search engines.

Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
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 (eg tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It’s not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique is not 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. Do not Deceiver 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 is up with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines did not exist?”

Do not 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 rankings may be affected adversely by those links.

Do not 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.

Do not use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Do not send automated queries to Google.

Do not load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Do not create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Do not 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 does not meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.

In the simplest terms, you could think of searching the web as looking in a very large book with an impressive index telling you exactly where everything is located. When you perform a Google search, our programs check our index to determine the most relevant search results to be returned ( “served”) to you.

Crawling:
Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.
We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an Algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google does not accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords service.

Indexing:
Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we can not process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

Serving results:
When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and people’s queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We only display these suggestions when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.