Brand new Guidelines for webmasters - from Google

I don’t know if you observed or not, but something has changed.

Every publisher and webmaster should read the webmaster guidelines which has been published ages ago by Google in their help center. If you didn’t, this is the greatest time: Google Webmaster Guidelines.

The interesting thing is… That this page looked totally different a few days ago! Google changed this document… The first thing I observed is in the very first category, when to submit a site to Google.
A few days ago, this was the to-do list:

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.

Now, this is the first block:

When your site is ready:
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap using 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.

The very interesting thing, Google recommended to have other sites link to yours. Now they don’t. Why? Did the inbound links lost their importance? Nah… The answer i guess is more nasty: payed links. Google hates payed links, and I think they want to get rid of them. And this was the first step: if the newbie webmasters don’t know about the importance of the inbound links, maybe they will not pay heavy money on getting them. That I knew ages ago that the importance of the directory links was cut in pieces, but not to recommend submitting? That’s weird. Maybe due to high number of directories? I have no idea. What about you?

Google Webmaster Guidelines now: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Google Webmaster Guidelines in the past: http://web.archive.org/web/20071225205102/www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

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