April 1st, 2020
Google is an automated search engine that uses web crawlers to continually explore the web. These crawlers are always searching for new content. So what guidelines should you use when designing your site? Here is a helpful guide, all of which can be found by visiting this general guideline page.
Links
When you design your website, make sure that all the pages can be reached by a link from another findable page. Referring links should have text, images, or an alternative attribute, which is relevant to the targeting page. Crawl-able links are tags with an href attribute.
Sitemaps
Your site should provide a sitemap file that has links that point to all relevant pages. This should be a simple list of links to these pages.
Page Links
Page links to be limited on each page (no more than a few thousand).
HTTP Header
Make sure that your trusted hosting provider correctly supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature directs your webserver to tell Google if your content has changed since they last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
Robot.txt File
Use the robots.txt file to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages. Keep the robots.txt file up to date. Learn how to manage crawling with the robots.txt file. Test the coverage and syntax of your robots.txt file using the robots.txt testing tool.
As stated on google’s page (linked above):
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Don't deceive your 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, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field. “
Conclusion
Again, for more help, visit the guideline page directly at this general guideline page. When following this guideline, your site will begin ranking higher than it currently is.
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