When submitting a site to Google's spider-based search engine, there are many site elements you should avoid because they can cause problems and diminish your rankings. Site elements such as query strings in your URL, using frames, using cookies, broken links, user input pages, redirected pages, graphic-intensive pages and decreasing keyword keyword weight by including large amounts of code cause problems with the spidering process. Here are elements you should avoid:

Using Frames

Google indexes each element of a frame separately. For this reason, if the content of one element of your frame is indexed, the user will only see that part of the frame and not the entire page. If is desirable to avoid frames altogether. However, if you must use frames, either place a NO FRAMES tag in your code or create a non-frame version of each page to submit to Google. The NO FRAME tag tells the Google spider to avoid indexing the frame and thereby get around the problem of frames. By submitting the non-frames version of a page, you also avoid only displaying part of the page to an Google user.

Requiring Cookies

Google spidering will affect sites attempting to set cookies. Many sites use cookies to track information about their users. Cookies themselves pose no problems to Google; however, the Google spider will not accept cookies as it crawls your site. Therefore, if a cookie must be accepted before the page loads, the spider will not crawl that page or any pages below it in your site. In short, if your determine that you want to serve cookies, make certain that your pages will load without the cookie being accepted or Google will not be able to fully crawl your site.

Broken Links

Broken links provide two problems to Google. Fundamentally, a broken link prevents the spider from crawling parts of your site and indexing that content. Also, a number of broken links is an indication of how credible the site is. For example, if your site has 20 "indexable" pages, but half of them contain broken links, Google will most likely determine that your site is not a valuable resource and will not thoroughly index it. As a result, it is important to make sure you have no broken links.

Redirection

Redirects are not a problem here. Instead of penalizing sites that have redirects, Google follows the links and indexes the page it finds.

Image Maps

Since Google performs deep crawls, image maps would pose a problem here. Search engine spiders do not have the luxury of clicking a link from your image map; they cannot index any pages that are linked to you site by an image map. If you do have an image map, you may want to consider including text-based hyperlinks to those pages as well. If you like, you can include them on the bottom of your page. If will provide the spider a pathway for finding those pages.

The most important factor that would cause a problem in Google would be to have no other sites within the Google index that link to your site. Link popularity is very important in Google's ranking system, and to not have any relevant links would return a very poor ranking for your Web site.