Site Elements That Can Cause Problems in Google

Like all search engines, Google spiders the pages that you submit in order to add them to it databases. Such elements include including query strings in your URL, using frames, using cookies, broken links, user input pages, redirected pages, graphic-intensive pages and decreasing keyword keyword weight by including large amounts of code cause problems with the spidering process.

Google indexes each element of a frame separately. For this reason, if the content of one element of your frame is indexed, the user will only see that part of the frame and not the entire page. If is desirable to avoid frames altogether. However, if you must use frames, either place a NO FRAMES tag in your code or create a non-frame version of each page to submit to Google. The NO FRAME tag tells the Google spider to avoid indexing the frame and thereby get around the problem of frames. By submitting the non-frames version of a page, you also avoid only displaying part of the page to an Google user.

Google spidering will affect sites attempting to set cookies. Many sites use cookies to track information about their users. Cookies themselves pose no problems to Google; however, the Google spider will not accept cookies as it crawls your site. Therefore, if a cookie must be accepted before the page loads, the spider will not crawl that page or any pages below it in your site. In short, if your determine that you want to serve cookies, make certain that your pages will load without the cookie being accepted or Google will not be able to fully crawl your site.

Broken links provide two problems to Google. Fundamentally, a broken link prevents the spider from crawling parts of your site and indexing that content. Also, a number of broken links is an indication of how credible the site is. For example, if your site has 20 "indexable" pages, but half of them contain broken links, Google will most likely determine that your site is not a valuable resource and will not thoroughly index it.

Because Google relies partly on the information and links included within the body of the Web pages, pushing that copy farther down the page in favor of large amounts of code such as JavaScript can also diminish rankings.

Google has numerous spam filters which check the Web site when it is submitted. Among these are checking for repeating using the same keyword with tags or text. The Google spider is able to reject those pages that have the same color text as the page's background color. This however, can pose a problem for those sites that use tables. For example, Google will reject a page with a white background and white text, even it the white text is only included within the table with a black background.

It is also important to remember , however, that you should not repeat the same words within the META tags over and over again. Google's policy regarding this practice is as follow:

"Don't try to increase your site's relevancy by repeating the same keyword over and over again. Google penalizes Web sites that attempt to subvert the index in this way. This abuse may lower the ranking of your site in Search Results pages or cause it to be removed from the Google index altogether."