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November 9, 2004

Google Guidelines

By QBlog in

Do you run a blog? Do you regularly read blogs? If so, are you aware of Google's Information for Webmasters?

Google's Information page includes the Quality Guidelines which "outline some of the illicit practices that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index. Once a site has been removed, it will no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's partner sites." Ouch.

Let's review a few items.

  • 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
  • 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.
  • Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
  • Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
  • Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
  • Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Google takes efforts to manipulate its search results very seriously. If you run a blog that does not follow the guidelines listed above, you may want to re-evaluate what you're doing with that blog. If you know of a blog that isn't following those guidelines, Google has a page that enables you to report such sites.

I love Google. I believe it's the finest search engine on the planet. I've been using Google since it first began and the service has only improved over the years. I hope you'll work to keep the quality of Google's search results as relevant as possible.

Comments (1) TrackBack (1)

Comments  

And as a responcible netizens, we should report the sites / blogs who are fillers designed only to manipulate google ranking?

:o)

Posted by: Imran Aziz | November 9, 2004 4:42 PM





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