Google's Search Engine Optimization Tips Starter Guide, Version 1.1, 13 Nov 2008, latest version at Google Webmaster Central don't want seen. Encrypting the content or password-protecting it with .htaccess are more secure alternatives. Avoid: • allowing search result-like pages to be crawled (users dislike leaving one search result page and landing on another search result page that doesn't add significant value for them) • allowing a large number of auto-generated pages with the same or only slightly different content to be crawled: "Should these 100,000 near-duplicate pages really be in a search engine's index?" • allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links Setting the value of the "rel" attribute of a link to "nofollow" will tell Google that certain links on your site shouldn't be followed or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked to.

Nofollowing a link is adding rel="nofollow" inside of the link's anchor tag. If you link to a site that you don't trust and don't want to pass your site's reputation to, use nofollow When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam.

Nofollowing these useradded links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site. Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this. This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guestbook's, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (e.g. if a commenter is trusted on your site), then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site. The Webmaster Help Center has more tips on avoiding comment spam, like using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.