Google Webmaster Guidelines

A brief introduction to the "rules" of Google.

By Patrick Sexton
The Google webmaster guidelines are a list of suggestions that Google has published as guidance to webmasters. The first sentence of the guidelines state their purpose quite clearly.

"Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site."

People who find that their website is not ranking well in Google can often find ways to improve their ranking by following these guidelines. The guidelines range from some very simple suggestions...
"Have other relevant sites link to yours."
To technical specifications...
"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."
The best way to learn about these guidelines is to read them and their supporting documentation on the Google website by following the link below.

Google webmaster guidelines

The official Google help pages also provide additional tips that advise a webmaster of what they can do to improve their ranking...

How can I create a Google-friendly site?

If you read the guidelines and do not understand some of the terms or concepts there is a website that takes each guideline one by one, and explains them for webmaster who might be new and unfamiliar with web terminology....

Google guidelines explained

By knowing the Google guidelines, you can help insure that your website is starting (or continuing) in the right direction as far as Google goes. They are the "rules of the road" for anyone who wishes their website to be included in the Google search engine.