Google now has it’s own SEO specific blog, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, dedicated to helping you help yourself to search engine page ranking success.
Matt Cutts recently shared “How to verify Googlebot” when it visits your site. “Debugging Blocked URLs” helps you undertand how to debug your robots.txt for crawl errors and URL restrictions. Vanessa Fox offers “Setting the Preferred Domain”, step-by-step tips on how to specify how you would like the URLs from your site crawled and indexed on Google. And she offers “How search results may differ based on accented characters and interface languages”, an excellent article on how accented characters found in many international words and languages are offered with and without the accents to increase their search result coverage.
Some powerful and fun insights into how Google works and how to make Google work with your site.
Site Search Tags: google, seo, search engine, webmaster, webdev, web development, search engine optimization, google webmaster
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network
Lorelle on WordPress 
9 Comments
I think that the Google blog is very usefull. Do you think that using robot.txt will help your search engine positions? I am to scared to put them into my site incase I mess up the positions that I already have, it does bug me though when I log into my google webmaster account and it says no robot.txt file found, it is the only slight error that it comes up with, what do you think I sholud do leave it how it is or get a robot.txt file. If you think I should get a robot.txt file then do you have any tips on how I can create one? Great blog by the way.
Best Regards
There are plenty of resources on creating a robots.txt file on the web. What you want to put into it depends upon what you want to do. As applies to Google and search engines, you probably want to add the User-agent for allow or disallow for search engines. A robots.txt file is just a text file called robots.txt with instructions for web crawlers stored in the root directory of your site.
By the way, David, your URL links to an SEO company which could trigger your comments as comment spam. Unless this is really your blog, you might want to be careful with that. Good luck.
Lorelle,
As usual, this is an awesome piece of information.
thanks!
Mauricio
Hi Lorelle, thanks for those comments I will be getting them put into my website soon I am just going to instruct the robots to follow all as I want all of my website to be crawled, do I have to put the robot text into all of the pages of my site or just the home page? above is a link to my blog/directory that I have made using WordPress, it is a directory of UK business websites that I like, what you can post comments on, is this frowned upon by WordPress, or is it O.K? How did you get your blog looking so nice? Is their a way to edit the coding in a wordpress weblog?
Best Regards
David,
There is only one robots.txt. You put it in the root directory of your site. That’s it. It has nothing to do with the pages on your site. You don’t even really need one, though it helps to say “allow” to web crawlers you want and “deny” to those you don’t, but it’s not rocket science.
The link, used in this blog as the link from your name, should go to “your” blog or site. Putting in any kind of SEO or commercial site is a clue to comment spam filters that this is potentially comment spam. I had to fish a couple of your comments out of my comment spam catcher. If you don’t have a blog, leave it blank. It does not help anyone if you have a link in your name. If you do, and people like what you have to say, they may click it and visit your blog. If not, who cares. You get no search engine or SEO benefit on this blog by including a URL. None. And you don’t have to. Only the email is required, which I don’t use. WordPress requires it, but it doesn’t have to “right”, just enter in something with an @.
WordPress.com now allows you to custom design your own blog if you a little extra. This is my own design and not available for use by anyone but me, me, me. 😉 Purchasing this extra feature is the only way to access ONLY the stylesheet to design your WordPress.com blog. You do not have any access to the underlying code or to use WordPress Plugins. You cannot use a robots.txt file. For more information on this see WordPress.com Custom CSS – All The Styles for the Sandbox Theme for the styles to custom create your own WordPress.com design, and What Do I Do With My New WordPress.com Blog for more information on WordPress.com blogs.
I hope this helps.
That’s a great help, thanks alot.
I am not able to insert a meta tag that is generated by the Google webmaster tool in my wordpress blog, can you please help me with this issue. Its urgent. Thanks a ton!!!
@ Vikram Deo:
I don’t understand. Just edit the head section of your site’s HTML and add these manually. I don’t know what options are available for blogspot blogs, but there must be some way of editing your blog’s template/HTML files. Add it there or contact blogspot customer support for more information.
Well I am really happy to hear this. I have had trouble verifying mine and never got it done. Was busy trying to figure out how I was suppose to access metas and upload and all of that stuff. Now I can go do it. My blog has been dormant for a little while because of this problem. But now Im on it. Thanks! 🙂
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