New Webmaster Guidelines Part 2 – Technical Guidelines

This is part 2 of an in depth look at the newly revised Webmaster Guidelines from Google. Google has recently updated their list of best practices and suggestions for site development. To give your site the best chance of ranking well, and to keep a competitive edge, the Google guidelines should be read like the gospel.

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• Did you ever wonder how Google processes your site to determine its focus and content? Try using a text-based browser like Lynx to understand what Google is using to interpret your site.

By displaying the page without dynamic elements such as Flash, JavaScript, cookies, sessions IDs or DHMTL, you will gain a keen insight as to what is actually visible to the Google. If there is not enough content to be read, then Google is going to have a difficult time indexing your site and establishing you value in the SERPs

• Allow bots to crawl your site without session IDs or arguments that are designed to track a user activity. Disallow specific URLs that you don’t want crawled in your robots.txt file. Sessions IDs are antiquated and should not be used in any new site development. You can use cookies instead for monitoring site traffic.

• Check to see that your web server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header. This tells Google if your content has changed since it last crawled your site, saving bandwidth and overhead.

• Use the robot.txt file to exclude directories that do not need to be crawled from Google. Keep it updated in your Webmaster Tools account and ensure that you are not blocking Google bot from crawling your site by testing it in Webmaster Tools.

• Keep advertisements (such as Google’s AdSense and DoubleClick) to a minimum and ensure that they are not affecting your rankings by making sure they are excluded in your robots.txt file.

• If you use a content management system (CMS), makes sure that it support seo friendly URL structure and is easily crawled by bots.

• Test you site in several browser’s (IE, FireFox, Chrome, Lynx, Opera, Safari) at different resolutions.

• Use tools to monitor page load speeds. This is becoming an increasingly bigger factor for rankings. Use Google’s Page Speed, or Webmaster Tools Site Performance Tool to gain insights on how to boost you page loads speeds.

SYNOPSIS:

• Make use of the robots.txt file to keep your site accessible to the Google bots
• Block unneeded/irrelevant content from
• Use SEO friendly urls and move away from parameter-based urls
• Monitor your page load speed and take steps to improve it.