Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

• Design, content, and technical guidelines
• Quality guidelines

When your site is ready:

• Have other relevant sites link to yours.
  
• Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
  
• Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
  
• Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
  
• Submit
  your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project
  and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Design and content guidelines

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
  
• Offer
  a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts
  of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may
  want to break the site map into separate pages.
• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
  
• Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
  
• Try
  to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or
  links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images.
• Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
  
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.
  
• If
  you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?”
  character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic
  pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short
  and the number of them few.
• Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).
  

Technical guidelines

• Use a text browser such as Lynx
  to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site
  much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies,
  session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your
  site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble
  crawling your site.
• Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs
  or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques
  are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access
  pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may
  result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to
  eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
  
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since
  HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether
  your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting
  this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This
  file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make
  sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block
  the Googlebot crawler. Visit http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html
  to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test
  your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google webmaster tools.
  
• If
  your company buys a content management system, make sure that the
  system can export your content so that search engine spiders can crawl
  your site.
• Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other
  auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or
manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other
misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by
registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to
assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included
on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their
energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a
much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than
those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.
Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems,
so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports
we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and
block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines – basic principles

• 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.”
• Avoid
  tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb
  is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a
  website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, “Does
  this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?”
• Don't participate in link schemes
  designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular,
  avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your
  own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't
  use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings,
  etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of
  Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines – specific guidelines

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration.