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Search Engine Tools
SEOs tend to use a lot of tools. Some of the most useful are provided by the search engines themselves. Search engines want webmasters to create sites and content in accessible ways, so they provide a variety of tools, analytics, and guidance. These free resources provide data points and unique opportunities for exchanging information with the engines.
Below we explain the common elements that each of the major search engines supporting and identify why they are useful.
Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many different types of content, including video, images, news, and mobile.
You can read the full details of the protocols at Sitemaps.org. In addition, you can build your own sitemaps at XML-Sitemaps.com. Sitemaps come in three varieties:
Extensible Markup Language (recommended format)
Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary
Text File
The robots.txt file, a product of the Robots Exclusion Protocol, is a file stored in a website's root directory (e.g., www.google.com/robots.txt). The robots.txt file gives instructions to automated web crawlers visiting your site, including search crawlers.
By using robots.txt, webmasters can indicate to search engines which areas of a site they would like to disallow bots from crawling, as well as indicate the locations of sitemap files and crawl-delay parameters. You can read more details about this at the robots.txt Knowledge Center page.
The following commands are available:
Warning: Not all web robots follow robots.txt. People with bad intentions (e.g., e-mail address scrapers) build bots that don't follow this protocol; and in extreme cases, they can use it to identify the location of private information. For this reason, it is recommended that the location of administration sections and other private sections of publicly accessible websites not be included in the robots.txt file. Instead, these pages can utilize the meta robots tag (discussed next) to keep the major search engines from indexing their high-risk content.
The meta robots tag creates page-level instructions for search engine bots.
The meta robots tag should be included in the head section of the HTML document.
In the example above, “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” tells robots not to include the given page in their indexes, and also not to follow any of the links on the page.
Remember how links act as votes? The rel=nofollow attribute allows you to link to a resource while removing your "vote" for search engine purposes. Literally, "nofollow", tells search engines not to follow the link, although some engines still follow them to discover new pages. These links certainly pass less value (and in most cases no juice) than their followed counterparts, but are useful in various situations where you link to an untrusted source.
In the example above, the value of the link would not be passed to example.com as the rel=nofollow attribute has been added.
Often, two or more copies of the exact same content appear on your website under different URLs. For example, the following URLs can all refer to a single homepage:
To search engines, these appear as five separate pages. Because the content is identical on each page, this can cause the search engines to devalue the content and its potential rankings.
The canonical tag solves this problem by telling search robots which page is the singular, authoritative version that should count in web results.
In the example above, rel=canonical tells robots that this page is a copy of http://www.example.com, and should consider the latter URL as the canonical and authoritative one.
Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
