Web Design and content guidelines

Disseminated from the Google Guidelines - these are constantly being updated, best to make another search

These are the Design and content guidelines, the Technical ones will be discussed below

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
4. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
6. Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are descriptive and accurate. (Working on this!)
7. Check for broken links and correct HTML. (Using Google webmaster tools for this)
8. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
9. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

Technical

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs ..............(TF doesn't use them)
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. (Not sure if I can do this)
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server
• .......make sure that your content management system exports content so that search engine spiders can crawl your site... (TF doesn't use CMS)
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines. (Done)

Quality

1. Make pages for users, not for search engines. - No "cloaking"
2. Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. - "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
3. Don't participate in link schemes
4. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages
5. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
6. Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
7. Don't send automated queries to Google.
8. Don't load pages with irrelevant words.
9. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. (Blog has content removed so this doesn't happen intentionally)
10. Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
11. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. (A "gateway" page was re-introduced April 2009 in a new approach)
12. 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.

Duplicate Content

This page is probably seen as Duplicate Content by Google as per the Penguin update