Submitting your URL to Google

Google is primarily a fully-automatic search engine with no human-intervention involved in the search process. It utilizes robots known as ‘spiders’ to crawl the web on a regular basis for new updates and new websites to be included in the Google Index. This robot software follows hyperlinks from site to site. Google does not require that you should submit your URL to its database for inclusion in the index, as it is done anyway automatically by the ‘spiders’. However, manual submission of URL can be done by going to the Google Google Addurl. This may speed up the indexing of your site but it is no guarentee. One important thing here is that Google does not accept payment of any sort for site submission or improving page rank of your website.

Cloaking

Sometimes, a webmaster might program the server in such a way that it returns different content to Google than it returns to regular users, which is often done to misrepresent search engine rankings. This process is referred to as cloaking as it conceals the actual website and returns distorted web pages to search engines crawling the site. This can mislead users about what they’ll find when they click on a search result. Google highly disapproves of any such practice and might place a ban on the website which is found guilty of cloaking.

Google Guidelines

Here are some of the important tips and tricks that can be employed while dealing with Google.

Do’s

• A website should be easy to navigate and have a crystal clear hierarchy.
• A site map is required to help the users go around your site and in case the site map has more than 100 links, then it is advisable to break it into several pages to avoid clutter.
• Find essential and precise keywords and make sure that your website features relevant and informative content.
• The Google crawler will not recognize text hidden in the images, so when describing important names, keywords or links; stick with plain text.
• The TITLE and ALT tags should be descriptive and accurate and the website should have no broken links or incorrect HTML.
• Dynamic pages (the URL consisting of a ‘?’ character) should be kept to a minimum because not every search engine spider is able to crawl them.
• The robots.txt file on your web server should be current and should not block the Googlebot crawler. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled.

Don’ts

• When making a site do not cheat the people who will surf your website. Do not provide them with irrelevant content or present them with any fraudulent schemes.
• Avoid tricks or link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking.
• Do not employ hidden texts or hidden links.
• Google frowns upon websites using cloaking technique. Hence, it is advisable to avoid that.
• Automated queries should not be sent to Google.
• Avoid stuffing pages with irrelevant words and content. Also don’t create multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with significantly duplicate content.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with hardly any original content.

Crawler/Spider Considerations

Also, consider technical factors. If a site has a slow connection, it might time-out for the crawler. Very complex pages (pages with all the bells and whistles) may time out before the crawler can harvest the text.

If you have a hierarchy of directories at your site, put the most important information high, not deep. Some search engines will presume that the higher you placed the information, the more important it is. And crawlers may not venture deeper than three or four or five directory levels.

Above all remember the obvious – full-text search engines index text. You may be tempted to use fancy and expensive design techniques that either block search engine crawlers or leave your pages with very little plain text that can be indexed. Don’t fall prey to that temptation.

The next post will look at some rules for getting better page ranking.

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