You should be able to reach every important page by at least one text link. For best results, use text links instead of images. Also don’t use images to display important names or content. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. So this would be detrimental to the purpose. Remember we want to make it as easy as possible for Google.

Offer your users a site map, at least for the important pages of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break it into separate pages. Too many links may make the engine believe your site is a “link farm” and therefore ignore it or worse. Also, check for broken links and correct HTML.

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web; these may negatively affect your own ranking.  “Bad neighborhoods are described as a "linking scheme" designed to trick the search engines, and are therefore subject to penalties and possible banning. The most well known bad neighborhood is the so-called "link farm".

Then when you’re ready to submit here’s the address: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project, Yahoo, and other industry-specific expert sites as well.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site; it will give you a picture similar to how search engine spiders see your site. 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.

Finally, take advantage of the Webmaster tools on Google. They make it easy to monitor and check 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.

With Google’s Crawl info: You can make sure we have access to your site, and see when Googlebot last visited. You can also view URLs that we’ve had trouble crawling and why we couldn't crawl them. This way, you can fix any problems preventing us from indexing all of your pages. To access the Google Ban Checker tool, just go to iwebtool.com

Webmaster Guidelines

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. 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.

Technical guidelines

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/wc/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 Sitemaps.

If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site.

Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

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 http://www. google.com/contact/spamreport.html. 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

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines