Google Webmaster Guidelines updated

Webmaster level: All

Today we’re happy to announce an updated version of our Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Both our basic quality guidelines and many of our more specific articles (like those on links schemes or hidden text) have been reorganized and expanded to provide you with more information about how to create quality websites for both users and Google.

The main message of our quality guidelines hasn’t changed: Focus on the user. However, we’ve added more guidance and examples of behavior that you should avoid in order to keep your site in good standing with Google’s search results. We’ve also added a set of quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets, as structured markup is becoming increasingly popular.

We hope these updated guidelines will give you a better understanding of how to create and maintain Google-friendly websites.

Posted by Betty Huang & Eric Kuan, Google Search Quality Team

Website testing & Google search

Webmaster level: Advanced

We’ve gotten several questions recently about whether website testing—such as A/B or multivariate testing—affects a site’s performance in search results. We’re glad you’re asking, because we’re glad you’re testing! A/B and multivariate testing are great ways of making sure that what you’re offering really appeals to your users.

Before we dig into the implications for search, a brief primer:
Website testing is when you try out different versions of your website (or a part of your website), and collect data about how users react to each version. You use software to track which version causes users to do-what-you-want-them-to-do most often: which one results in the most purchases, or the most email signups, or whatever you’re testing for. After the test is finished you can update your website to use the “winner” of the test—the most effective content.

A/B testing is when you run a test by creating multiple versions of a page, each with its own URL. When users try to access the original URL, you redirect some of them to each of the variation URLs and then compare users’ behaviour to see which page is most effective.

Multivariate testing is when you use software to change differents parts of your website on the fly. You can test changes to multiple parts of a page—say, the heading, a photo, and the ‘Add to Cart’ button—and the software will show variations of each of these sections to users in different combinations and then statistically analyze which variations are the most effective. Only one URL is involved; the variations are inserted dynamically on the page.

So how does this affect what Googlebot sees on your site? Will serving different content variants change how your site ranks? Below are some guidelines for running an effective test with minimal impact on your site’s search performance.

• No cloaking.
  Cloaking—showing one set of content to humans, and a different set to Googlebot—is against our Webmaster Guidelines, whether you’re running a test or not. Make sure that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content variant to serve, based on user-agent. An example of this would be always serving the original content when you see the user-agent “Googlebot.” Remember that infringing our Guidelines can get your site demoted or removed from Google search results—probably not the desired outcome of your test.
• Use rel=“canonical”.
  If you’re running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the rel=“canonical” link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original URL is the preferred version. We recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation. Let’s say you were testing variations of your homepage; you don’t want search engines to not index your homepage, you just want them to understand that all the test URLs are close duplicates or variations on the original URL and should be grouped as such, with the original URL as the canonical. Using noindex rather than rel=“canonical” in such a situation can sometimes have unexpected effects (e.g., if for some reason we choose one of the variant URLs as the canonical, the “original” URL might also get dropped from the index since it would get treated as a duplicate).
• Use 302s, not 301s.
  If you’re running an A/B test that redirects users from the original URL to a variation URL, use a 302 (temporary) redirect, not a 301 (permanent) redirect. This tells search engines that this redirect is temporary—it will only be in place as long as you’re running the experiment—and that they should keep the original URL in their index rather than replacing it with the target of the redirect (the test page). JavaScript-based redirects are also fine.
• Only run the experiment as long as necessary.
  The amount of time required for a reliable test will vary depending on factors like your conversion rates, and how much traffic your website gets; a good testing tool should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable conclusion. Once you’ve concluded the test, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly. This is especially true if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

The recommendations above should result in your tests having little or no impact on your site in search results. However, depending on what types of content you’re testing, it may not even matter much if Googlebot crawls or indexes some of your content variations while you’re testing. Small changes, such as the size, color, or placement of a button or image, or the text of your “call to action” (“Add to cart” vs. “Buy now!”), can have a surprising impact on users’ interactions with your webpage, but will often have little or no impact on that page’s search result snippet or ranking. In addition, if we crawl your site often enough to detect and index your experiment, we’ll probably index the eventual updates you make to your site fairly quickly after you’ve concluded the experiment.

To learn more about website testing, check out these articles on Content Experiments, our free testing tool in Google Analytics. You can also ask questions about website testing in the Analytics Help Forum, or about search impact in the Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Reconsideration requests get more transparent

Webmaster level: All

If your site isn't appearing in Google search results, or it's performing more poorly than it once did (and you believe that it does not violate our Webmaster Guidelines), you can ask Google to reconsider your site. Over time, we’ve worked to improve the reconsideration process for webmasters. A couple of years ago, in addition to confirming that we had received the request, we started sending a second message to webmasters confirming that we had processed their request. This was a huge step for webmasters who were anxiously awaiting results. Since then, we’ve received feedback that webmasters wanted to know the outcome of their requests. Earlier this year, we started experimenting with sending more detailed reconsideration request responses and the feedback we’ve gotten has been very positive!

Now, if your site is affected by a manual spam action, we may let you know if we were able to revoke that manual action based on your reconsideration request. Or, we could tell you if your site is still in violation of our guidelines. This might be a discouraging thing to hear, but once you know that there is still a problem, it will help you diagnose the issue.

If your site is not actually affected by any manual action (this is the most common scenario), we may let you know that as well. Perhaps your site isn’t being ranked highly by our algorithms, in which case our systems will respond to improvements on the site as changes are made, without your needing to submit a reconsideration request. Or maybe your site has access issues that are preventing Googlebot from crawling and indexing it. For more help debugging ranking issues, read our article about why a site may not be showing up in Google search results.

We’ve made a lot of progress on making the entire reconsideration request process more transparent. We aren’t able to reply to individual requests with specific feedback, but now many webmasters will be able to find out if their site has been affected by a manual action and they’ll know the outcome of the reconsideration review. In an ideal world, Google could be completely transparent about how every part of our rankings work. However, we have to maintain a delicate balance: trying to give as much information to webmasters as we can without letting spammers probe how to do more harm to users. We're happy that Google has set the standard on tools, transparency, and communication with site owners, but we'll keep looking for ways to do even better.

Posted by Tiffany Oberoi and Michael Wyszomierski, Search Quality Team

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Webmaster level: Intermediate

So you’re going global, and you need your website to follow. Should be a simple case of getting the text translated and you’re good to go, right? Probably not. The Google Webmaster Team frequently builds sites that are localized into over 40 languages, so here are some things that we take into account when launching our pages in both other languages and regions.

(Even if you think you might be immune to these issues because you only offer content in English, it could be that non-English language visitors are using tools like Google Translate to view your content in their language. This traffic should show up in your analytics dashboard, so you can get an idea of how many visitors are not viewing your site in the way it’s intended.)

More languages != more HTML templates

We can’t recommend this enough: reuse the same template for all language versions, and always try to keep the HTML of your template simple.

Keeping the HTML code the same for all languages has its advantages when it comes to maintenance. Hacking around with the HTML code for each language to fix bugs doesn’t scale–keep your page code as clean as possible and deal with any styling issues in the CSS. To name just one benefit of clean code: most translation tools will parse out the translatable content strings from the HTML document and that job is made much easier when the HTML is well-structured and valid.

How long is a piece of string?

If your design relies on text playing nicely with fixed-size elements, then translating your text might wreak havoc. For example, your left-hand side navigation text is likely to translate into much longer strings of text in several languages–check out the difference in string lengths between some English and Dutch language navigation for the same content. Be prepared for navigation titles that might wrap onto more than one line by figuring out your line height to accommodate this (also worth considering when you create your navigation text in English in the first place).

Variable word lengths cause particular issues in form labels and controls. If your form layout displays labels on the left and fields on the right, for example, longer text strings can flow over into two lines, whereas shorter text strings do not seem associated with their form input fields–both scenarios ruin the design and impede the readability of the form. Also consider the extra styling you’ll need for right-to-left (RTL) layouts (more on that later). For these reasons we design forms with labels above fields, for easy readability and styling that will translate well across languages.

click to enlarge

Also avoid fixed-height columns–if you’re attempting to neaten up your layout with box backgrounds that match in height, chances are when your text is translated, the text will overrun areas that were only tall enough to contain your English content. Think about whether the UI elements you’re planning to use in your design will work when there is more or less text–for instance, horizontal vs. vertical tabs.

On the flip side

Source editing for bidirectional HTML can be problematic because many editors have not been built to support the Unicode bidirectional algorithm (more research on the problems and solutions). In short, the way your markup is displayed might get garbled:

<p>ابةتث <img src="foo.jpg" alt=" جحخد"< ذرزسش!</p>

Our own day-to-day usage has shown the following editors to currently provide decent solutions for bidirectional editing: particularly Coda, and also Dreamweaver, IntelliJ IDEA and JEditX.

When designing for RTL languages you can build most of the support you need into the core CSS and use the directional attribute of the html element (for backwards compatibility) in combination with a class on the body element. As always, keeping all styles in one core stylesheet makes for better maintainability.

Some key styling issues to watch out for: any elements floated right will need to be floated left and vice versa; extra padding or margin widths applied to one side of an element will need to be overridden and switched, and any text-align attributes should be reversed.

We generally use the following approach, including using a class on the body tag rather than a html[dir=rtl] CSS selector because this is compatible with older browsers:

Elements:

<body class="rtl">
<h1><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"><img alt="Google" src="http://www.google.com/images/logos/google_logo.png" /></a> Heading</h1>

Left-to-right (default) styling:

h1 {
  height: 55px;
  line-height: 2.05;
  margin: 0 0 25px;
  overflow: hidden;
}
h1 img {
  float: left;
  margin: 0 43px 0 0;
  position: relative;
}

Right-to-left styling:

body.rtl {
  direction: rtl;
}
body.rtl h1 img {
  float: right;
  margin: 0 0 0 43px;
}

(See this in action in English and Arabic.)

One final note on this subject: most of the time your content destined for right-to-left language pages will be bidirectional rather than purely RTL, because some strings will probably need to retain their LTR direction–for example, company names in Latin script or telephone numbers. The way to make sure the browser handles this correctly in a primarily RTL document is to wrap the embedded text strings with an inline element using an attribute to set direction, like this:

<h2>‫עוד ב- <span dir="ltr">Google</span>‬</h2>

In cases where you don’t have an HTML container to hook the dir attribute into, such as title elements or JavaScript-generated source code for message prompts, you can use this equivalent to set direction where ‫ and ‬‬ are Unicode control characters for right-to-left embedding:

<title>&#x202B;‫הפוך את Google לדף הבית שלך‬&#x202C;</title>

Example usage in JavaScript code:

var ffError = '\u202B' +'כדי להגדיר את Google כדף הבית שלך ב\x2DFirefox, לחץ על הקישור \x22הפוך את Google לדף הבית שלי\x22, וגרור אותו אל סמל ה\x22בית\x22 בדפדפן שלך.'+ '\u202C';

(For more detail, see the W3C’s articles on creating HTML for Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left scripts and authoring right-to-left scripts.)

It’s all Greek to me…

If you’ve never worked with non-Latin character sets before (Cyrillic, Greek, and a myriad of Asian and Indic), you might find that both your editor and browser do not display content as intended.

Check that your editor and browser encodings are set to UTF-8 (recommended) and consider adding a element and the lang attribute of the html element to your HTML template so browsers know what to expect when rendering your page–this has the added benefit of ensuring that all Unicode characters are displayed correctly, so using HTML entities such as é (é) will not be necessary, saving valuable bytes! Check the W3C’s tutorial on character encoding if you’re having trouble–it contains in-depth explanations of the issues.

A word on naming

Lastly, a practical tip on naming conventions when creating several language versions. Using a standard such as the ISO 639-1 language codes for naming helps when you start to deal with several language versions of the same document.

Using a conventional standard will help users understand your site’s structure as well as making it more maintainable for all webmasters who might develop the site, and using the language codes for other site assets (logo images, PDF documents) is handy to be able to quickly identify files.

See previous Webmaster Central posts for advice about URL structures and other issues surrounding working with multi-regional websites and working with multilingual websites.

That’s a summary of the main challenges we wrestle with on a daily basis; but we can vouch for the fact that putting in the planning and work up front towards well-structured HTML and robust CSS pays dividends during localization!

Posted by Kathryn Cullen, Google Webmaster Team

A new, improved form for reporting webspam

Webmaster level: All

Everyone on the web knows how frustrating it is to perform a search and find websites gaming the search results. These websites can be considered webspam - sites that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and try to trick Google into ranking them highly. Here at Google, we work hard to keep these sites out of your search results, but if you still see them, you can notify us by using our webspam report form. We’ve just rolled out a new, improved webspam report form, so it’s now easier than ever to help us maintain the quality of our search results. Let’s take a look at some of our new form’s features:

Option to report various search issues

There are many search results, such as sites with malware and phishing, that are not necessarily webspam but still degrade the search experience. We’ve noticed that our users sometimes report these other issues using our webspam report form, causing a delay between when a user reports the issue and when the appropriate team at Google handles it. The new form’s interstitial page allows you to report these other search issues directly to the correct teams so that they can address your concerns in a timely manner.

Simplified form with informative links

To improve the readability of the form, we’ve made the text more concise, and we’ve integrated helpful links into the form’s instructions. Now, the ability to look up our Webmaster Guidelines, get advice on writing actionable form comments, and block sites from your personalized search results is just one click away.

Thank you page with personalization options

Some of our most valuable information comes from our users, and we appreciate the webspam reports you submit to us. The thank you page explains what happens once we’ve received your webspam report. If you want to report more webspam, there’s a link back to the form page and instructions on how to report webspam more efficiently with the Chrome Webspam Report Extension. We also provide information on how you can immediately block the site you’ve reported from your personalized search results, for example, by managing blocked sites in your Google Account.

At Google, we strive to provide the highest quality, most relevant search results, so we take your webspam reports very seriously. We hope our new form makes the experience of reporting webspam as painless as possible (and if it doesn’t, feel free to let us know in the comments).

Posted by Jen Lee and Alissa Roberts, Search Quality Team

Test your webmaster know-how!

Webmaster Level: All

We thought it might be fun and educational to create a quiz for webmasters about issues we commonly see in the Webmaster Help Forum. Together with our awesome Bionic Posters, we've tried to come up with questions and answers that reflect recurring concerns in the forum and some information that may not be well known. Some things to keep in mind when taking this quiz:

• The quiz will be available to take from today until Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST.
• It doesn't cover all facets of webmaster problems that arise, and—as with any test—it is at best only a fun way to test your webmaster prowess ;). We leave discussion of specific cases to the forum.
• We've set up the quiz using our very own Google Docs. This means you won't see results right away, but we plan to write a follow-up blog post explaining answers and listing top scorers. Be sure to save your answers or print out your completed quiz before submitting! This way you can check your answers against the correct ones when we publish them.
• It's just for fun!

Now go take the quiz!

Posted by Charlene Perez, Search Quality Team

Tips on requesting reconsideration

Do you think your site might be penalized because of something that
happened on it? As two leaders of the reconsideration team, we recently made
a video to help you discover how to create a good reconsideration request,
including tips on what we look for on our side. Watch the video and then
let us know if you have questions in the comments!



Posted by Rachel Searles and Brian White, Search Quality Team

Information about buying and selling links that pass PageRank

Written by Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye

Our goal is to provide users the best search experience by presenting equitable and accurate results. We enjoy working with webmasters, and an added benefit of our working together is that when you make better and more accessible content, the internet, as well as our index, improves. This in turn allows us to deliver more relevant search results to users.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

In order to stay within Google's quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a rel="nofollow" or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robots.txt'ed out. Here's more information explaining our stance on buying and selling links that pass PageRank:

February 2003: Google's official quality guidelines have advised "Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank" for several years.

September 2005: I posted on my blog about text links and PageRank.

December 2005: Another post on my blog discussed this issue, and said

Many people who work on ranking at search engines think that selling links can lower the quality of links on the web. If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

September 2006: In an interview with John Battelle, I noted that "Google does consider it a violation of our quality guidelines to sell links that affect search engines."

January 2007: I posted on my blog to remind people that "links in those paid-for posts should be made in a way that doesn’t affect search engines."

April 2007: We provided a mechanism for people to report paid links to Google.

June 2007: I addressed paid links in my keynote discussion during the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference in Seattle. Here's a video excerpt from the keynote discussion. It's less than a minute long, but highlights that Google is willing to use both algorithmic and manual detection of paid links that violate our quality guidelines, and that we are willing to take stronger action on such links in the future.

June 2007: A post on the official Google Webmaster Blog noted that "Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines." The post also introduced a new official form in Google's webmaster console so that people could report buying or selling of links.

June 2007: Google added more specific guidance to our official webmaster documentation about how to report buying or selling links and what sort of link schemes violate our quality guidelines.

August 2007: I described Google's official position on buying and selling links in a panel dedicated to paid links at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose.

September 2007: In a post on my blog recapping the SES San Jose conference, I also made my presentation available to the general public (PowerPoint link).

October 2007: Google provided comments for a Forbes article titled "Google Purges the Payola".

October 2007: Google officially confirmed to Search Engine Land that we were taking stronger action on this issue, including decreasing the toolbar PageRank of sites selling links that pass PageRank.

October 2007: An email that I sent to Search Engine Journal also made it clear that Google was taking stronger action on buying/selling links that pass PageRank.

We appreciate the feedback that we've received on this issue. A few of the more prevalent questions:

Q: Is buying or selling links that pass PageRank a violation of Google's guidelines? Why?
A: Yes, it is, for the reasons we mentioned above. I also recently did a post on my personal blog that walks through an example of why search engines wouldn't want to count such links. On a serious medical subject (brain tumors), we highlighted people being paid to write about a brain tumor treatment when they hadn't been aware of the treatment before, and we saw several cases where people didn't do basic research (or even spellchecking!) before writing paid posts.

Q: Is this a Google-only issue?
A: No. All the major search engines have opposed buying and selling links that affect search engines. For the Forbes article Google Purges The Payola, Andy Greenberg asked other search engines about their policies, and the results were unanimous. From the story:

Search engines hate this kind of paid-for popularity. Google's Webmaster guidelines ban buying links just to pump search rankings. Other search engines including Ask, MSN, and Yahoo!, which mimic Google's link-based search rankings, also discourage buying and selling links.

Other engines have also commented about this individually, e.g. a search engine representative from Microsoft commented in a recent interview and said

The reality is that most paid links are a.) obviously not objective and b.) very often irrelevant. If you are asking about those then the answer is absolutely there is a risk. We will not tolerate bogus links that add little value to the user experience and are effectively trying to game the system.

Q: Is that why we've seen some sites that sell links receive lower PageRank in the Google toolbar?
A: Yes. If a site is selling links, that can affect our opinion about the value of that site or cause us to lose trust in that site.

Q: What recourse does a site owner have if their site was selling links that pass PageRank, and the site's PageRank in the Google toolbar was lowered?
A: The site owner can address the violations of the webmaster guidelines and submit a reconsideration request in Google's Webmaster Central console. Before doing a reconsideration request, please make sure that all sold links either do not pass PageRank or are removed.

Q: Is Google trying to tell webmasters how to run their own site?
A: No. We're giving advice to webmasters who want to do well in Google. As I said in this video from my keynote discussion in June 2007, webmasters are welcome to make their sites however they like, but Google in turn reserves the right to protect the quality and relevance of our index. To the best of our knowledge, all the major search engines have adopted similar positions.

Q: Is Google trying to crack down on other forms of advertisements used to drive traffic?
A: No, not at all. Our webmaster guidelines clearly state that you can use links as means to get targeted traffic. In fact, in the presentation I did in August 2007, I specifically called out several examples of non-Google advertising that are completely within our guidelines. We just want disclosure to search engines of paid links so that the paid links won't affect search engines.

Q: I'm aware of a site that appears to be buying/selling links. How can I get that information to Google?
A: Read our official blog post about how to report paid links from earlier in 2007. We've received thousands and thousands of reports in just a few months, but we welcome more reports. We appreciate the feedback, because it helps us take direct action as well as improve our existing algorithmic detection. We also use that data to train new algorithms for paid links that violate our quality guidelines.

Q: Can I get more information?
A: Sure. I wrote more answers about paid links earlier this year if you'd like to read them. And if you still have questions, you can join the discussion in our Webmaster Help Group.

More ways for you to give us input

At Google, we are always working hard to provide searchers with the best possible results. We've found that our spam reporting form is a great way to get your input as we continue to improve our results. Some of you have asked for a way to report paid links as well.

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren't useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines.

Today, in response to your request, we're providing a paid links reporting form within Webmaster Tools. To use the form, simply log in and provide information on the sites buying and selling links for purposes of search engine manipulation. We'll review each report we get and use this feedback to improve our algorithms and improve our search results. in some cases we may also take individual action on sites.

If you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this, including:

• Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the href tag
• Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

We value your input and look forward to continuing to improve our great partnership with you.

More details about our webmaster guidelines

Posted by Vanessa Fox

At SMX Advanced on Monday, Matt Cutts talked about our webmaster guidelines. Later, during Q&A, someone asked about adding more detail to the guidelines: more explanation about violations and more actionable help on how to improve sites. You ask -- we deliver! On Tuesday, Matt told the SMX crowd that we'd updated the guidelines overnight to include exactly those things! We work fast around here. (OK, maybe we had been working on some of it already.)

So, what's new? Well, the guidelines themselves haven't changed. But the specific quality guidelines now link to expanded information to help you better understand how to spot and fix any issues. That section is below so you can click through to explore these new details.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

As Riona MacNarmara recently posted in our discussion forum, we are working to expand our webmaster help content even further and want your input. If you have suggestions, please post them in either the thread or as a comment to this post. We would love to hear from you!

About those fake penalty notification emails

(This post was translated from our German webmaster blog, originally written by Stefanie.)

We are aware that a number of German webmasters have received fake penalty notification emails that allegedly came from Google Search Quality. These spam emails have created some confusion about their authenticity, since we send very similar email notifications, which you can read more about here. Therefore, we clearly want to state that these emails are not related to any of Google's efforts concerning webmaster notification.

Updated: Because these emails are easy to mistake for authentic ones from Google, we've temporarily discontinued sending them as we work on ways to provide more secure communication mechanisms. We hope this will reduce confusion.

In the original post, we had listed the ways to tell if the email you received was not from Google. However, as we've temporarily stopped sending emails about guidelines violations, you can safely assume that any email you receive isn't from us. Note that the emails we sent did not include attachments. In addition, some of the emails mentioned 301 redirects as being the violation in question. Rest assured that 301 redirects are not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. Note that we do provide information about some violations in webmaster tools. If your site previously violated the guidelines and you've made changes to fix it, you can let us know by filing a reinclusion request.

This post has been updated to indicate that we've temporarily stopped sending emails to webmasters about guidelines violations to reduce confusion.

Indexar o seu site

Após o registo de um domínio e criação de um site, a maioria dos webmasters quer ver o seu site indexado e aparecer nas primeiras posições no Google. Desde que iniciámos o suporte a webmasters de língua Portuguesa em 2006, vimos grande especulação acerca da forma como o Google indexa e avalia os sites. O mercado de língua Portuguesa, ainda numa fase de desenvolvimento em relação a SEO, é um dos maiores geradores de conteúdo na internet, por isso decidimos clarificar algumas das questões mais pertinentes.

Notámos como prática comum entre webmasters de língua Portuguesa a tendência para entrar em esquemas massivos de troca de links e a implementação de páginas única e exclusivamente para este fim, sem terem em consideração a qualidade dos links, a origem ou o impacto que estes terão nos seus sites a longo termo; outros temas populares englobam também uma preocupação excessiva com o PageRank ou a regularidade com que o Google acede aos seus sites.
Geralmente, o nosso conselho para quem pretende criar um site é começar por considerar aquilo que têm para oferecer antes de criar qualquer site ou blog. A receita para um site de sucesso é conteúdo original, onde os utilizadores possam encontrar informação de qualidade e actualizada correspondendo às suas necessidades.

Para clarificar alguns destes temas, compilámos algumas dicas para webmasters de língua Portuguesa:

• Ser considerado autoridade no assunto. Ser experiente num tema guiará de forma natural ao seu site utilizadores que procuram informação especificamente relacionada com o assunto do site. Não se preocupe demasiado com back-links ou PageRank, ambos irão surgir de forma natural acompanhando a importância e relevância do seu site. Se os utilizadores considerarem a sua informação útil e de qualidade, eles voltarão a visitar, recomendarão o seu site a outros utilizadores e criarão links para o mesmo. Isto tem também influência na relevância do seu site para o Google – se é relevante para os utilizadores, certamente será relevante para o Google na mesma proporção.
• Submeta o seu conteúdo no Google e mantenha-o actualizado frequentemente. Este é outro ponto chave que influencia a frequência com que o seu site é acedido pelo Google. Se o seu conteúdo não é actualizado ou se o seu site não é relevante, o mais certo é o Google não aceder ao seu site com a mesma frequência que você deseja. Se acha que o Google não acede ao seu site de uma forma constante, talvez isto seja uma dica para que actualize o site mais frequentemente. Além disso na Central do Webmaster o Google disponibiliza as Ferramentas para Webmasters, ferramentas úteis que o ajudarão na indexação.
• Evite puras afiliações. Na América Latina há uma quantidade massiva de sites criados apenas para pura afiliação, tais como as lojas afiliadas do mercadolivre. Não há problema em ser afiliado desde que crie conteúdo original e de qualidade para os utilizadores, um bom exemplo é a inclusão de avaliação e críticas de produtos de forma a ajudar o utilizador na decisão da compra.
• Não entre em esquemas de troca de links. Os esquemas de troca de links ou negócios que prometem aumentar a visibilidade do seu site com o mínimo de esforço, podem levar a um processo de correcção por parte do Google. As nossas Directrizes de Ajuda do Webmaster mencionam claramente esta prática na secção "Directrizes de Qualidade – princípios básicos". Evite entrar neste tipo de esquemas e não crie páginas apenas para troca de links. Tenha em mente que não é o número de links que apontam para o seu site que conta, mas a qualidade e relevância desses links.
• Use o AdSense de forma correcta. Monetizar conteúdo original e de qualidade levará a uma melhor experiência com o AdSense comparado com directórios sem qualquer tipo de qualidade ou conteúdo original. Sites sem qualquer tipo de valor levam os utilizadores a abandoná-los antes mesmo de estes clicarem em qualquer anúncio.
  Lembre-se que o processo de indexação e de acesso ao seu site pelo Google engloba muitas variáveis e em muitos casos o seu site não aparecerá no índice tão depressa quanto esperava. Se não está seguro acerca de um problema particular, considere visitar as Directrizes de Ajuda do Webmaster ou peça ajuda na sua comunidade. Na maioria dos casos encontrará a resposta que procura de outros utilizadores mais experientes. Um dos sítios recomendados para começar é o Grupo de Discussão de Ajuda a Webmasters que monitorizamos regularmente.

Getting your site indexed

After registering a domain and creating a website, the next thing almost everybody wants is to get it indexed in Google and rank high. Since we started supporting webmasters in the Portuguese language market in 2006, we saw a growing speculation about how Google indexes and ranks websites. The Portuguese language market is one of the biggest web content generators and it's still in development regarding SEO, so we decided to shed some light into the main debated questions.

We have noticed that it is very popular among Portuguese webmasters to engage in massive link exchange schemes and to build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites; other popular issues involve an over-concern with PageRank and how often Google crawls their websites.

Generally, our advice is to consider what you have to offer, before you create your own website or blog. The recipe for a good and successful site is unique and original content where users find valuable and updated information corresponding to their needs.

To address some of these concerns, we have compiled some hints for Portuguese webmasters:

• Be an authority on the subject. Being experienced in the subject you are writing about will naturally drive users to your site who search for that specific subject. Don't be too concerned about back-links and PageRank, both will grow naturally as your site becomes a reference. If users find your site useful and of good quality, they will most likely link to your site, return to it and/or recommend your site to other users. This has also an influence on how relevant your site will be to Google — if it's relevant for the users, than it's likely that it is relevant to Google as well.
• Submit your content to Google and update it on a frequent basis. This is another key factor for the frequency with which your site will be crawled. If your content is not frequently updated or if your site is not relevant to the subject, most likely you will not be crawled as often as you would like to be. If you wonder why Google doesn't crawl your sites on a frequent or constant basis, then maybe this is a hint and you should look into updating your site more often. Apart from that in the Webmasters Central we offer Webmaster tools to help you get your site crawled.
• Don't engage in link exchange schemes. Be aware that link exchange programs or deals that promise to boost your site visibility with a minimum effort might entail some corrective action from Google. Our Google Webmasters Guidelines clearly address this issue under "Quality Guidelines – basic principles". Avoid engaging in these kind of schemes and don't build pages specifically for exchanging links. Bear in mind that it is not the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but the quality and relevance of those links.
• Avoid pure affiliations. In the Latin America market there is a massive number of sites created just for pure affiliation purposes such as pure mercadolivre catalogs. There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that a user can't find anywhere else like product reviews and ratings.
• Use AdSense wisely. Monetizing original and valuable content will generate you more revenue from AdSense compared to directories with no added value. Be aware that sites without added value will turn away users from your site before they will ever click on an AdSense ad.

You should bear in mind that the process of indexing and how Google crawls your site includes many variables and in many cases your site won't come up as quickly in the SERPs as you expected. If you are not sure about some particular issue, consider visiting the Google Webmasters Guidelines or seek guidance in your community. In most cases you will get good advice and positive feedback from more experienced users. One of the recommended places to start is the Google discussion group for webmasters (in English) as well as the recently launched Portuguese discussion group for webmasters which we will monitor on a regular basis.

Estuvimos presentes en Madrid

El pasado 8 y 9 de Marzo asistimos al congreso OJOBuscador en Madrid. Este evento fue muy interesante para nosotros dado que nos dio la oportunidad de escuchar a los ponentes de distintos motores de búsqueda y dialogar con los webmasters acerca de sus principales inquietudes relacionadas con el posicionamiento en buscadores en español. Uno de los puntos que se mencionaron con frecuencia, tanto en las sesiones de posicionamiento como en las charlas informales, fue la desventaja de competir en el mercado SEO donde varias empresas utilizan métodos solapados que van en contra de las directrices oficiales de Google.

Entre las técnicas que hemos observado están las de generar dominios satélite o crear infinidades de páginas irrelevantes con el único objetivo de ganar tráfico en búsquedas que no están necesariamente relacionadas con el contenido del sitio. Otro fenómeno que hemos observado es la continua aparición de dominios que sólo tienen contenido procedente de afiliados sin aportar valor único o relevante.

Vamos a ser más severos con las técnicas previamente mencionadas, porque en Google consideramos que es muy importante no defraudar a los usuarios. Por otra parte, consideramos que la responsabilidad última de los contenidos de un sitio pertenece al webmaster, quien debe velar por su calidad y verificar que sus paginas tengan como finalidad primera satisfacer a los usuarios.

Con el propósito de mejorar la comunicación con la comunidad de webmasters, queremos anunciar que Google a partir de ahora estará presente y participará activamente en el Foro de Google para webmasters.

We were in Madrid

Last 8th and 9th of March we went to the OJOBuscador conference in Madrid. The event was very interesting for us since we had the chance to listen to presentations from the main search engines and to discuss with the webmasters their main concerns regarding Spanish search engine positioning. One key point mentioned frequently both in the SEO sessions and in the informal chats was the disadvantage of working in an SEO market where several companies use sneaky methods that go against the official Webmaster Guidelines.

There are some techniques such as generating satellite domains or creating thousands of irrelevant pages with the sole purpose of gaining traffic in search queries that are not always related to sites' content. Another phenomenon we have observed is the steady influx of domains which only have content from affiliate sites without adding any unique value or relevance.

We are going to be stricter against the techniques previously discussed, as we consider it is very important to avoid deceiving the users. Nevertheless, we think the ultimate responsibility for the contents of a website belongs to the webmaster, who should watch over the site quality and verify that the pages are made for the user.

Aiming to enhance communication with the webmaster community, we would like to announce that going forward Google will participate and monitor the Spanish Webmaster Discussion Forum.

Após o registo de um domínio e criação de um site, a maioria dos webmasters quer ver o seu site indexado e aparecer nas primeiras posições no Google. Desde que iniciámos o suporte a webmasters de língua Portuguesa em 2006, vimos grande especulação acerca da forma como o Google indexa e avalia os sites. O mercado de língua Portuguesa, ainda numa fase de desenvolvimento em relação a SEO, é um dos maiores geradores de conteúdo na internet, por isso decidimos clarificar algumas das questões mais pertinentes.

Notámos como prática comum entre webmasters de língua Portuguesa a tendência para entrar em esquemas massivos de troca de links e a implementação de páginas única e exclusivamente para este fim, sem terem em consideração a qualidade dos links, a origem ou o impacto que estes terão nos seus sites a longo termo; outros temas populares englobam também uma preocupação excessiva com o PageRank ou a regularidade com que o Google acede aos seus sites.

Geralmente, o nosso conselho para quem pretende criar um site é começar por considerar aquilo que têm para oferecer antes de criar qualquer site ou blog. A receita para um site de sucesso é conteúdo original, onde os utilizadores possam encontrar informação de qualidade e actualizada correspondendo às suas necessidades.

Para clarificar alguns destes temas, compilámos algumas dicas para webmasters de língua Portuguesa:

• Ser considerado autoridade no assunto. Ser experiente num tema guiará de forma natural ao seu site utilizadores que procuram informação especificamente relacionada com o assunto do site. Não se preocupe demasiado com back-links ou PageRank, ambos irão surgir de forma natural acompanhando a importância e relevância do seu site. Se os utilizadores considerarem a sua informação útil e de qualidade, eles voltarão a visitar, recomendarão o seu site a outros utilizadores e criarão links para o mesmo. Isto tem também influência na relevância do seu site para o Google – se é relevante para os utilizadores, certamente será relevante para o Google na mesma proporção.
  

• Submeta o seu conteúdo no Google e mantenha-o actualizado frequentemente. Este é outro ponto chave que influencia a frequência com que o seu site é acedido pelo Google. Se o seu conteúdo não é actualizado ou se o seu site não é relevante, o mais certo é o Google não aceder ao seu site com a mesma frequência que você deseja. Se acha que o Google não acede ao seu site de uma forma constante, talvez isto seja uma dica para que actualize o site mais frequentemente. Além disso na Central do Webmaster o Google disponibiliza as Ferramentas para Webmasters, ferramentas úteis que o ajudarão na indexação.
  

• Evite puras afiliações. Na América Latina há uma quantidade massiva de sites criados apenas para pura afiliação, tais como as lojas afiliadas do mercadolivre. Não há problema em ser afiliado desde que crie conteúdo original e de qualidade para os utilizadores, um bom exemplo é a inclusão de avaliação e críticas de produtos de forma a ajudar o utilizador na decisão da compra.
  

• Não entre em esquemas de troca de links. Os esquemas de troca de links ou negócios que prometem aumentar a visibilidade do seu site com o mínimo de esforço, podem levar a um processo de correcção por parte do Google. As nossas Directrizes de Ajuda do Webmaster mencionam claramente esta prática na secção "Directrizes de Qualidade – princípios básicos". Evite entrar neste tipo de esquemas e não crie páginas apenas para troca de links. Tenha em mente que não é o número de links que apontam para o seu site que conta, mas a qualidade e relevância desses links.
  

• Use o AdSense de forma correcta. Monetizar conteúdo original e de qualidade levará a uma melhor experiência com o AdSense comparado com directórios sem qualquer tipo de qualidade ou conteúdo original. Sites sem qualquer tipo de valor levam os utilizadores a abandoná-los antes mesmo de estes clicarem em qualquer anúncio.

Lembre-se que o processo de indexação e de acesso ao seu site pelo Google engloba muitas variáveis e em muitos casos o seu site não aparecerá no índice tão depressa quanto esperava. Se não está seguro acerca de um problema particular, considere visitar as Directrizes de Ajuda do Webmaster ou peça ajuda na sua comunidade. Na maioria dos casos encontrará a resposta que procura de outros utilizadores mais experientes. Um dos sítios recomendados para começar é o Grupo de Discussão de Ajuda a Webmasters que monitorizamos regularmente.

Linkowanie

Szczególnie popularną wśród polskich webmasterów metodą optymalizacji stron pod kątem wyszukiwarek jest wymiana lub zakup linków o wysokim PageRank. W przeszłości niewątpliwie była to jedna z możliwości, która faktycznie przynosiła efekty. Niestety przy wyborze linków użytkownicy i ich zainteresowania nie zawsze są uwzględniane. Prowadzi to do linkowania serwisów i stron internetowych niezwiązanych ze sobą tematycznie. Tego typu linki nie stanowią żadnej wartości informacyjnej dla osób odwiedzających i są postrzegane jako nieetyczna metoda SEO, podobnie jak ukryty tekst. Wytyczne Google dla webmasterów jednoznacznie odnoszą się do takich praktyk.

Dbając o polskich użytkowników, Google niedawno ulepszył algorytmy i metody weryfikacji istotnych linków. Celem tych starań jest udostępnienie jak najlepszych wyników SERP (strony z wynikami wyszukiwania).

Jak więc należy poprawnie linkować strony internetowe, aby nie wykraczać poza wytyczne Google?
Starając się podwyższyć PageRank i dzięki temu osiągnąć lepsze notowanie strony w SERP, należy kierować się potrzebami potencjalnych użytkowników odwiedzających dany serwis, zarówno przy wyborze treści, jak i linków. Linkowanie do i linki z tematycznie związanych stron są doceniane przez Google i bez wątpienia będą pozytywnie wpływać na pozycje w indeksie. Równocześnie Google dąży do zlikwidowania wpływu masowej wymiany linków tematycznie rozbieżnych oraz linków zakupionych. Odnosi się to również do zautomatyzowanych systemów wymiany linków.

Jak więc postarać się o wartościowe linki?
Najlepszą metodą uzyskania dobrych linków jest niepowtarzalna, interesująca treść, która w naturalny sposób zdobędzie popularność w społeczności internetowej, a szczególnie wśród grona osób zainteresowanych danym tematem, na przykład u autorów blogów. Naturalnie uzyskane linki istnieją dłużej niż kupione, ponieważ nadane bezinteresownie rzadziej są usuwane. Niezależnie od rodzaju strony internetowej, czy tematu, należy kierować się wyłącznie potrzebami potencjalnych użytkowników. Każda decyzja odnosząca się do linkowania powinna być poprzedzona pytaniem: Czy będzie to użyteczne dla odwiedzających moją stronę?

Linking

One popular way to optimize webpages for search engines, especially among Polish Web masters, is with link exchanges or buying high PageRank links. Unfortunately, in the choice of link partners, some webmasters' priority has not always been on what is best for the user. This causes some people to link to totally unrelated pages or engage in link exchanges with spammy sites. This kind of linking does not provide additional value to the page’s visitors and is a SEO method that, like hiding text, can be considered spammy. Google’s webmaster guidelines refer clearly to methods of this type under "quality guidelines".

Caring about our Polish users, Google recently improved algorithms and methods of link validation for our Polish search results. We do this because we want to provide our users with the best SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) possible.

How to link in order not to violate Google’s webmaster guidelines?
If you want to increase your PageRank and to improve your position in the SERPs, you should always be thinking about your visitors’ needs. This refers to content as much as to linking.

Linking to and from related sites is still very much appreciated by Google and it will have a positive impact on the position in the index. Simultaneously, Google will work to stop the impact of excessive off-topic link exchanging or bought links, including automated link exchange programs.

How to create relevant links?
The best way to gain relevant links is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community, especially among those who are interested in the topic, such as blog publishers. Also, look for editorially given links based on merit, since naturally grown links tend to exist longer; and such links will pass the test of time. Therefore, the best way to go is to focus on your visitors’ needs, no matter how this is related to content or linking. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

An update on spam reporting

(Note: this post has been translated into English from our German blog.)

In 2006 one of our initiatives in the area of communication was to notify some webmasters in case of a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines (e.g. by using a "particular search engine friendly" software that generates doorways as an extra). No small number of these good-will emails to webmasters have been brought about by spam reports from our users.

We are proud of our users who alert us to potential abuses for the sake of the whole internet community. We appreciate this even more, as PageRank™ (and thus Google search) is based on a democratic principle, i.e. a webmaster is giving other sites a "vote" of approval by linking to it.

In 2007 as an extension and complement of this democratic principle, we want to further increase our users' awareness of webmaster practices that do or do not conform to Google's standards. Such informed users are then able to take counter-action against webspam by filing spam reports. By doing so a mutually beneficial process can be initiated. Ultimately, not only will all Google users benefit from the best possible search quality, but also will spammy webmasters realize that their attempts to unfairly manipulate their site's ranking will pay off less and less.

Our spam report forms are provided in two different flavors: an authenticated form that requires registration in Webmaster Tools, and an unauthenticated form. Currently, we investigate every spam report from a registered user. Spam reports to the unauthenticated form are assessed in terms of impact, and a large fraction of those are reviewed as well.

So, the next time you can't help thinking that the ranking of a search result was not earned by virtue of its content and legitimate SEO, then it is the perfect moment for a spam report. Each of them can give us crucial information for the continual optimization of our search algorithms.

Interested in learning more? Then find below answers to the three most frequent questions.

FAQs concerning spam reports:

Q: What happens to an authenticated spam report at Google?
A: An authenticated spam report is analyzed and then used for evaluating new spam-detecting algorithms, as well as to identify trends in webspam. Our goal is to detect all the sites engaging in similar manipulation attempts automatically in the future and to make sure our algorithms rank those sites appropriately. We don´t want to get into an inefficient game of cat and mouse with individual webmasters who have reached into the wrong bag of tricks.

Q: Why are there sometimes no immediately noticeable consequences of a spam report?
A: Google is always seeking to improve its algorithms for countering webspam, but we also take action on individual spam reports. Sometimes that action will not be immediately visible to an outside user, so there is no need to submit a site multiple times in order for Google to evaluate a URL. There are different reasons that might account for a user´s false impression that a particular spam report went unnoticed. Here are a few of those reasons:

• Sometimes, Google might already be handling the situation appropriately. For example, if you are reporting a site that seems to engage in excessive link exchanging, it could be the case that we are already discounting the weight of those unearned backlinks correctly, and the site is showing up for other reasons. Note that changes in how Google handles backlinks for a site are not immediately obvious to outside users. Or it may be the case that we already deal with a phenomenon such as keyword stuffing correctly in our scoring, and therefore we are not quite as concerned about something that might not look wonderful, but that isn't affecting rankings.
• A complete exclusion from Google´s SERPs is only one possible consequence of a spam report. Google might also choose to give a site a "yellow card" so that the site can not be found in the index for a short time. However, if a webmaster ignores this signal, then a "red card" with a longer-lasting effect might follow. So it's possible that Google is already aware of an issue and communicating with the webmaster about that issue, or that we have taken action other than a removal on a spam report.
• Sometimes, simple patience is the answer, because it takes time for algorithmic changes to be thoroughly checked out, or for the externally displayed PageRank to be updated.
• It can also be the case that Google is working on solving the more general instance of an issue, and so we are reluctant to take action on an individual situation.
• A spam report may also just have been considered unjustified. For example, this may be true for a report whose sole motivation appears to attempt to harm a direct competitor with a better ranking.

Q: Can a user expect to receive feedback for a spam report?
A: This is a common request, and we know that our users might like verification of the reported URLs or simple confirmation that the spam report had been taken care of. Given the choice how to spend our time, we have decided to invest our efforts into taking action on spam reports and improving our algorithms to be more robust. But we are open to consider how to scale communication with our users going forward.

Tips for Eastern European webmasters

In 2006 we ramped up on international webmaster issues and particularly tried to support Eastern Europe. We opened several offices in the region, improved our algorithms with respect to these languages, and localized many of our products. Should I find only one word to describe these markets, I would say they are diverse. Still, they have two things in common: their online markets are currently in a developing phase and a high number of webmasters and search engine optimizers work there in a variety of languages. We are aware that a certain amount of webspam is generated in this region and we would like to reinforce that we have been working hard to take action on it both algorithmically and manually. Since I have seen some common phenomena in a bunch of these markets, here are a couple of suggestions for Eastern European webmasters and SEOs:

• Avoid link exchanges. If a fellow webmaster approaches you with some sketchy offer, just refuse. Instead, work on the content of your site. Once you have the quality content, you can use the buzzing blogger community and social web services in your language to get nice linkbaits. Creating good content for your language community will pay off. Help the high-quality people in your language community and they will re-power you.
• Use regional and geographical domains in line with their purpose. First, a sidenote for the Western webmasters: some Eastern European countries like Poland and Russia have so-called regional or geographical domains. Imagine that all the states in the U.S. had their official second level domain and if you wanted to open your webshop delivering to Kentucky, you could do it cheap or for free on eg. ky.us. This could help Google serve geographically relevant search results. In case you wish to sell organic soaps to people in Szczecin, do open your webshop on szczecin.pl. If you are from Kalmykia and would like to show the world the beauty of your area, go ahead and set up your Kalmyki travel site on kalmykia.ru. If you like a region, support it by hosting your site on the related regional or geographical domain. Be aware that webspam on these regional domains violates the correct use of them and prevents the development of your country's web culture.
• Say no to Cybersquats! Sneaky registering of strong online brands with Belarusian, Estonian or Slovak top level domains is just bad. While it will not particularly help you boost the ranking of your site, cybersquatting often has created disappointed users and legal actions as side effects.
• Think long-term. You have your share of responsibility for the development of your market. Creating quality sites that target users who search for highly specific content in your particular language will help you get your market into a more mature status -- and mature markets mean mature publisher revenue too.

Site content and use of web catalogues

Sites with more content can have more opportunities to rank well in Google. It makes sense that having more pages of good content represent more chances to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Some SEOs however, do not focus on the user’s needs, but instead create pages solely for search engines. This approach is based on the false assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy for a site. These techniques are usually accomplished by abusing qlweb style catalogues or by scraping content from sources known for good, valid content, like Wikipedia or the Open Directory Project.

These methods violate Google's webmaster guidelines. Purely scraped content, even from high quality sources, does not provide any added value to your users. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results.

In order to provide best results possible to our Polish and non-Polish users, Google continues to improve its algorithms for validating web content.

Google is willing to take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other autogenerated pages that don't add any value to users. Companies, webmasters, and domain owners who consider SEO consultation should take care not to spend time on methods which will not have worthwhile long-term results. Choosing the right SEO consultant requires in-depth background research, and their reputation and past work should be important factors in your decision.

PS: Head on over to our Polish discussion forum, where we're monitoring the posts and chiming in when we can!

Treść oraz katalogi na serwisach internetowy

Serwisy o dużej ilości stron mają szanse na wyższe pozycje w indeksie Google. Oznacza to, że oferując wiele stron z niepowtarzalną treścią można polepszyć notowania w wynikach wyszukiwarek (SERP). Fakt ten jest znany i wykorzystywany przez przedsiębiorstwa oferujące usługi pozycjonowania witryn internetowych. Często jednak nie jest brane pod uwagę, że treść strony powinna być tworzona dla użytkowników, a nie dla wyszukiwarek (w tym Google). Takie podejście prowadzi do błędnego założenia, że wystarczy zwiększyć ilość stron konkretnej domeny, dodając na przykład katalogi z dowolną, niejednokrotnie zupełnie nieistotną treścią, aby na dłuższy okres czasu wypozycjonować domenę. Przejawia się to między innymi nadużywaniem katalogów typu qlweb lub kopiowaniem znanych z jakościowo dobrej treści serwisów, jak Wikipedia lub Open Directory Project.

Takie metody są bez wątpliwości rozbieżne z wytycznymi Google dla webmasterów. Dowolnie skopiowane treści, nawet jeżeli dobrej jakości, nie stanowią większej wartości informacyjnej dla użytkowników. Aby wyróżnić serwis internetowy, warto poświęcić czas na tworzenie nowej treści, dzięki czemu można zwiększyć lojalność użytkowników i dostarczyć przydatnych wyników w wyszukiwarce.

W trosce o naszych polskich użytkowników (i nie tylko) Google konsekwentnie ulepsza algorytmy weryfikujące merytoryczną wartość serwisów internetowych.

Google jest skłonny podejmować działania przeciwko domenom, których webmasterzy usiłują osiągnąć lepsze pozycje w wynikach poprzez dodawanie skopiowanej lub automatycznie wygenerowanej treści, która nie stanowi żadnej wartości dla użytkowników. Przedsiębiorstwa, webmasterzy oraz właściciele domen biorący pod uwagę konsultacje specjalistów SEO, powinni zadbać o to, żeby ich czas nie był wykorzystywany na stosowanie metod nieprzynoszących długoterminowych rezultatów. Przy wyborze doradców oraz firm oferujących pozycjonowanie, ich reputacja jest kluczowym czynnikiem i powinna zostać dokładnie zweryfikowana przed podjęciem ostatecznej decyzji.

PS: Zapraszamy na naszą polską grupe dyskusyjną, na której z zainteresowaniem czytamy Wasze wpisy i staramy się na nie reagować.

Posted by Kaspar Szymanski, Search Quality

Update to our webmaster guidelines

As the web continues to change and evolve, our algorithms change right along with it. Recently, as a result of one of those algorithmic changes, we've modified our webmaster guidelines. Previously, these stated:


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

However, we've recently removed that technical guideline, and now index URLs that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is. Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you. If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls.