Web Developer’s Search Engine Reference Guide

Web Developer’s Search Engine Reference Guide

 
  • Search Engine Webmaster Tools

    • Google
      • Google Webmaster Home Page

      • Intro to Webmaster Academy. Three hour course covering setting up your website, how Google understands your site, how Google search works, Webmaster guidelines, setting up your Webmaster Tools account, sitemaps.

        Note on 3/26/14 we detected a problem with the page at a width of around 800px where it dropped the links for the course on the right hand side of the page. Those links will appear at wider width and at small widths at the bottom of the screen. Also the Help choice at the top breadcrumb take you to another page with the same links.

      • Webmaster FAQ. Answers to the most common questions about Google and Webmaster Tools

      • Removing a URL from Google Video gives great insights into how Google craws



    • Bing. Bing (known previously as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine (advertised as a “decision engine”[2]) from Microsoft.
      • Bing Web Master Tools. Sign-in and links to general resources such as submitting your site to Bing.

      • Bing Webmaster Tools Help. Webmaster Help & How To provides you with assistance for the Bing Webmaster Tools as well as with guidelines on how to be successful in Bing search.

      • Bing Webmaster Guidelines. These guidelines cover a broad range of topics and are intended to help your content be found and indexed within Bing.

    • Yandex. Yandex is a Russian Internet company which operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 60% market share in that country. It also develops a number of Internet-based services and products. Yandex ranked as the 4th largest search engine worldwide. These links are provided for educational purposes only. Russia is a speciality market and so you need security and marketing expertise before you register and before you decide to code pages for Yandex.
      • Yandex Web Master Tools. Yandex.Webmaster is a service that provides you with information about the indexing of your websites. Webmaster lets you inform Yandex of new and deleted webpages, customize the indexing of your site and improve the ranking and appearance of your website in Yandex search results.

      • Help. Manual to help webmasters and site owners to make their site index seamlessly and be ranked correctly by Yandex search engine.

    • Baidu. In China, Baidu is a web services company and handles most of the search engine requests in China. These links are provided for educational purposes only. China is a speciality market and so you need security and marketing expertise before you register and before you decide to code pages for Baidu.
  • Sitemap. Is an XML (eXtensible Markup Lanuage) file on your website that lists the pages for search engines to consume in crawling your website. Very useful for dynamic generated content and incompletely linked content.

  • Robots.txt. An optional text file placed that provides directions to search engine crawlers, called robots and spiders, to ignore crawling all or parts of the website public files. Does not control the robots, only asks kindly not to crawl. A search engine may have its own policy on how to honor disallowed items listed in the robots.txt file.