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 user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site.
Illustration of a user comment containing external links.
Automatically add nofollow to comment columns and message boards
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 guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties (for example, 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 Google Search Central documentation has more tips on avoiding comment spam, for example by using CAPTCHAs and turning on comment moderation.
Illustration of a CAPTCHA popup
Optimize your images
Use HTML images
Use HTML image elements to embed images in your content.
Use the HTML or
Semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and process images. By using the
Using CSS to display images that you want us to index.
Use the alt attribute
Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. The alt attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason.
Illustration showing the usefulness of good alt text for an image.
Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.
Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Images to better understand your images.
Use brief but descriptive filenames and alt text
Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text are best when they're short, but descriptive.
Using generic filenames like image1.jpg, pic.gif, 1.jpg when possible—if your site has thousands of images you might want to consider automating the naming of the images.
Writing extremely lengthy filenames.
Stuffing keywords into alt text or copying and pasting entire sentences.
Supply alt text when using images as links
If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing anchor text for a text link.
Writing excessively long alt text that would be considered spammy.
Using only image links for your site's navigation.
Help search engines find your images
An Image sitemap can provide Google with more information about the images found on your site. This increases the likelihood that your images can be found in Google Images results. The structure of this file is similar to the XML sitemap file for your web pages.
Use standard image formats
Use commonly supported filetypes; most browsers support JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP and WebP image formats. It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type.
Make your site mobile-friendly
The world is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.
SEO Freelancer IndiaUnderstand the difference between devices
Smartphone - In this document, "mobile" or "mobile devices" refers to smartphones, such as devices running Android, iPhone, or Windows Phone. Mobile browsers are similar to desktop browsers in that they can render a broad set of the HTML5 specification, although their screen size is smaller and in almost all cases their default orientation is vertical.
Tablet - We consider tablets as devices in their own class, so when we speak of mobile devices, we generally do not include tablets in the definition. Tablets tend to have larger screens, which means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, you can assume that users expect to see your site as it would look on a desktop browser rather than on a smartphone browser.
Multimedia phone - These are phones with browsers that are able to render pages coded to meet XHTML standards, support HTML5 Markup, JavaScript/ECMAScript but might not support some of the extension APIs in the HTML5 standard. This generally describes the browser in most 3G-ready phones that are not smartphones.
Feature phones - On these phones, browsers lack the capability to render normal desktop web pages coded using standard HTML. This includes browsers that render only cHTML (iMode), WML, XHTML-MP, etc.
Our recommendations are geared toward smartphones, but we encourage multimedia and feature phones site owners to follow the same advice where they feel appropriate.
Choose a mobile strategy
There are multiple ways of making your website mobile ready and Google supports different implementation methods:
Responsive web design (Recommended)
Dynamic serving
Separate URLs
After you have created a mobile-ready site, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check if pages on your site meet the criteria for being labeled mobile-friendly on Google Search result pages. You can also check out the Search Console Mobile Usability report to fix mobile usability issues affecting your site.
If your site serves lots of static content (like blog posts or product landing pages) across multiple pages, consider implementing it using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). It's a special flavor of HTML that ensures your site stays fast and user friendly, and can be further accelerated by various platforms, including Google Search.
Configure mobile sites so that they can be indexed accurately
Regardless of which configuration you choose to set up your mobile site, take note of these key points:
If you use Dynamic Serving or have a separate mobile site, signal to Google when a page is formatted for mobile (or has an equivalent page that's formatted for mobile). This helps Google accurately serve mobile searchers your content in search results.
If you are using Responsive Web Design, use the meta name="viewport" tag to tell the browser how to adjust the content. If you use Dynamic Serving, use the Vary HTTP header to signal your changes depending on the user agent. If you are using separate URLs, signal the relationship between two URLs by adding the tag with rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" elements to the page.
Keep resources crawlable. Blocking page resources can give Google an incomplete picture of your website. This often happens when your robots.txt file is blocking access to some or all of your page resources. If Google doesn't have access to a page's resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, or images, we may not detect that it's built to display and work well on a mobile browser. In other words, we may not detect that the page is mobile-friendly, and therefore not properly serve it to mobile searchers.
Avoid common mistakes that frustrate mobile visitors, such as featuring unplayable videos.
Mobile pages that provide a poor searcher experience can be demoted in rankings or displayed with a warning in mobile search results. This includes but is not limited to full page interstitials on mobile that hinder user experience.
Provide full functionality on all devices. Mobile users expect the same functionality—such as commenting and check-out—and content on mobile as well as on all other devices that your website supports. In addition to textual content, make sure that all important images and videos are embedded and accessible on mobile devices. For search engines, provide all structured data and other metadata—such as titles, descriptions, link-elements, and other meta-tags—on all versions of the pages.
Make sure that the structured data, images, videos, and metadata you have on your desktop site are also included on the mobile site.
Best Practices
