A Fresh Look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines

Taken a look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines lately? If not, you should.

Seems that the team at Google have been quietly editing the guidelines pages since I last popped my head in about a few months ago. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I can bring to your attention some additions made to the Webmaster Guidelines in the past year:

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

This is a biggie. Explains why sites with URLs that include session id's have such trouble getting listed in Google! A very convincing reason to integrate a parameter workaround if your site uses dynamically generated pages, whether they include session id's or not.

Submit a sitemap as part of our Google Sitemaps (Beta) project. Google Sitemaps uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

This one was obviously added after the launch of Sitemaps and is good advice for any webmaster serious about getting all their pages indexed by Googlebot.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Note the words in bold have been added to this sentence sometime in the past year. Nothing to write home about here except perhaps an inkling that the ODP is not as important as it used to be.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Again, the words in bold have been added since last year. Looks like an attempt by Google to reinforce their firm stance against cloaking. Also provides their personal definition of what cloaking is, a topic that has seen great debate in the search engine industry over the past 12 months.