Google Webmaster Cental Advice On Ways To Creating Valuable Startpages

As obvious as it sounds, Google's official webmaster central blog has an article on “How to create valuable startpages,” on how to create startpages.

Startpage is a webpage with a lot of links about a specific topic. Besides hyperlinks, startpages often contain text, animations and pictures. The whole startpage concept began in September 1998 with the launch of Startpagina.nl, which was set up to be an online linkbook for the inexperienced Internet user. Since then, Startpagina.nl has become a huge success, mainly because an enormous number of volunteers created and maintained the different startpages covering lots of interesting and diverse topics.

Making useful startpages

As a search engine, we love to have useful and diverse pages showing up in the search results we present to our users. We thought it would be a good idea to highlight some of the best practices we've seen in creating value-added startpages.

• Create your startpage for users, and not for search engines. This involves making sure that all your text on the page is visible to users, and writing full sentences as descriptions instead of just keywords.
• Try to deliver unique, informative and on-topic content. The structure of startpages is pretty straightforward and does not leave much room for variation. However, you can make a difference. Try to find a topic you know a lot about that has not been fully covered yet. Create good categories that are related to your topic and give a relevant title to every category. Then, find links that are related to the categories on your page and label every link with an anchor text that is relevant. For example, instead of naming your links 'link1', 'link2' et cetera, you can choose names that make clear where the link is pointing to. And you can write a short description for every category.
• Don't create startpages out of commercial intent or for the sole purpose of exchanging links. Of course there is nothing wrong with trying to monetize your startpage, but a page with only banners and affiliate links is not the best user experience and therefore not recommended. The same goes for startpages that are created as part of a link network. For example, pages that have all links pointing to a particular website and to other startpages that are also pointing to that same website. These kind of link schemes have no added value for the user and go against the Google webmaster guidelines.

Fill a paid links form incase you come across a which is involved in buying and selling links for the sole purpose of manipulating SERPs. For more reports on wrong doings, sene the Google team a spam report.

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