Publishing Best Practices

When working with the Google Search Appliance, use these tips and guidelines provided by Google to improve the search experience for users trying to find your content.

Content and Design

Make web pages for users, not for search engines

Create a useful, information-rich content site. Write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Don't load pages with irrelevant words. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Focus on text

Focus on the text on your site. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. Since the Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images, avoid using graphical text and instead place information within the alt and anchor text of pictures. When linking to non-HTML documents, use strong descriptions within the anchor text that describe the links your site is making.

Make your site easy to navigate

Make a site with a clear hierarchy of hypertext links. Every page should be reachable from at least one hypertext link. Offer a site map to your users with hypertext links that point to the important parts of your site. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Ensure that your site is linked

Ensure that your site is linked from all relevant sites within your network. Interlinking between sites and within sites gives the Google crawler additional ability to find content, as well as improving the quality of the search.

Technical

Back to top

Make sure that the Google crawler can read your content

Validate all HTML content to ensure that the HTML is well-formed. Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If extra features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine crawlers may have trouble crawling your site.

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 multiple copies of the same document being indexed for your site, as crawl robots will see each unique URL (including session ID) as a unique document.

Ensure that your site's internal link structure provides a hypertext link path to all of your pages. The Google search engine follows hypertext links from one page to the next, so pages that are not linked to by others may be missed. Additionally, you should consult the administrator of your Google Search Appliance to ensure that your site's home page is accessible to the search engine.

Use robots standards to control search engine interaction with your content

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which files and directories can or cannot be crawled, including various file types. If the search engine gets an error when getting this file, no content will be crawled on that server. The robots.txt file will be checked on a regular basis, but changes may not have immediate results. Each port (including HTTP and HTTPS) requires its own robots.txt file.

Use robots meta tags to control whether individual documents are indexed, whether the links on a document should be crawled, and whether the document should be cached. The "NOARCHIVE" value for robots meta tags is supported by the Google search engine to block cached content, even though it is not mentioned in the robots standard.

For information on how robots.txt files and ROBOTS meta tags work, see the Robots Exclusion standard at:
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

If the search engine is generating too much traffic on your site during peak hours, contact your Google Search Appliance administrator to customize the traffic.

Let the search engine know how fresh your content is

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell the Google Search Appliance whether your content has changed since it last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead. Columbia's webservers support this feature.

Understand why some documents may be missing from the index

Each time that the Google Search Appliance updates its database of web pages, the documents in the index can change. Here are a few examples of reasons why pages may not appear in the index.

• Your content pages may have been intentionally blocked by a robots.txt file or ROBOTS meta tags.
• Your web site was inaccessible when the crawl robot attempted to access it, due to network or server outage. If this happens, the Google Search Appliance will retry multiple times; but if the site cannot be crawled, it will not be included in the index.
• The Google crawl robot cannot find a path of links to your site from the starting points it was given.
• Your content pages may not be considered relevant to the query you entered. Ensure that the query terms exist on your target page.
• Your content pages contain invalid HTML code.
• Your content pages were manually removed from the index by the Google Search Appliance administrator.

If you still have questions, contact your Google Search Appliance administrator to get more information.

Avoid using frames

The Google search engine supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, e-mail links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (where every document corresponds to a single URL).

Searches that return framed pages will most likely only produce hits against the "body" HTML page and present it back without the original framed "Menu" or "Header" pages. Google recommends that you use tables or dynamically generate content into a single page (using ASP, JSP, PHP, etc.), instead of using FRAME tags. This will ultimately maintain the content owner's originally intended look and feel, as well as allow most search engines to properly index your content.

Avoid placing content and links in script code

Most search engines do not read any information found in SCRIPT tags within an HTML document. This means that content within script code will not be indexed, and hypertext links within script code will not be followed when crawling. When using a scripting language, make sure that your content and links are outside SCRIPT tags. Investigate alternate HTML technologies to dynamic web pages, such as HTML layers.