Google issue some guidelines to help them view the best bits of your website

Google has released some guidelines on their blog  which aim to help the search engines crawlers find the things on your website that are useful and not things that make it complicated for the search engine bots to crawl your website.

Google recommend using your robots.txt file to stop them from viewing things like the shopping cart or contact page on your site as Google says thfese aren’t relevant to search.  One word of caution on your Contact us page though.  If the only place you mention your physical location (e.g. Portsmouth) is the Contact Us page make sure there is at least one other place you mention this before disallowing the Contact Us page using your Robots file – the last thing you want to do is lose rankings in your local area or country by stopping Google from seeing this.

Another tip for the search engine crawlers is to watch infinite spaces which you might find on a calendar page.  An infinite space allows the creation of pages on your website which end ?id=1, ?id=2, ?id=345566 which is great but if every number under the sun after the equals sign returns a 200 error Google and the other engines are going to spend an awfully long time crawling nonexistent pages from your site.

Google also recommend removing things like Session Ids or user specific information from the end of URLs.  These are normally tags which are automatically appended to your website such as ?PHPSESSID=1233455 but as they are added to the end of an existing URL this creates duplicate content, which as we know is something which can harm your rankings.  This is also their final tip, making sure that each piece of content is available on one URL only and if needed using the Canonical Tag to resolve issues where content is available on more than one URL.

Now some of this might sound like the common sense we’ve been talking about in SEO for some time, but Google obviously felt the need to reiterate it, so maybe there are more people out there who need SEO than we thought?

Emily Mace
Campaign Delivery Manager

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