Information for Web Site Creators
Overview
The instructions and information on this page are provided to help KFUPM web site creators to:
- prepare web content for indexing in Google
- make best use of Google's features
How to...
Get pages into the index
Google's indexing robot starts at the top of the KFUPM web site and follows links to find all indexable pages within the KFUPM search collection. All you need to do to get your web pages into the KFUPM/Google index is:
- put the pages up in a web space that is not excluded from the KFUPM search collection
- make sure your pages don't contain meta tags that prevent the robot from indexing your page
- make sure your page can be reached by clicking links from one of the top-level pages in the KFUPM search collection
There is no need to submit pages to the index: the Google crawler will pick up changed, new, and removed pages automatically during its scheduled crawls.
If a page is not in the index, perform a search for all pages that link to your page. The syntax for this search is: "link:yourdomain.com" For example, to see if pages link to your personal page at KFUPM, you would enter "link:http://www.kfupm.edu.sa/~mypage" into the google.kfupm.edu.sa search box. The results will give you a list of all pages that link to your page.
If you would like your page(s) to be listed in the KFUPM index, visit http://www1.kfupm.edu.sa/kfupm/atoz/ and click on the "suggestions" link.
Note that if your web pages do not have any external links from other pages in the KFUPM search collection, they won't be picked up by the Google crawler.
Keep pages out of the index
If you don't want a page to be indexed, insert this <meta> tag within your page's <head> tag:
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
</head>
This will prevent crawlers (robots) from indexing the page, and from following any links from the page. If the page has already been indexed, it will be removed from the index the next time Google crawls the page.
Put a search box on your site
You can add a search box to your web site, to help visitors find content on your site. You can restrict the search to a specified directory, or search the entire KFUPM web site. The search box will look and behave like this:
The visitor can enter a search term and click the Search button; the page will leave your site and display the search results in a formatted page.
1. Insert the following HTML into your web page where you want the search box to appear:
<form method='get' action='http://www.google.com/u/KFUPMInfo'>
<input type="hidden" name="domains" value="kfupm.edu.sa" />
<input type="hidden" name="sitesearch" value="<yoururl>" />
<input type='text' name='q' size='32' maxlength='255' value=''/>
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</form>
2. Customize the following parameters:
- name='q' size='32'
Sets the width (in number of characters) of the search box. You can change the size to suit your site's layout, but don't change the maxlength value. - name='sa' value='Search'
The text that appears on the search button.
e.g.:
"Search Computer Engineering Site")
If you want to restrict your search feature to a specific directory (and its subdirectories), include the following parameter (sitesearch).
If you want the search feature on your site to search the entire KFUPM collection, remove this parameter from your HTML.
name='sitesearch' value='<yoururl>'
Pages in the specified directory will be included in your search.
e.g.:
name='sitesearch' value='www.kfupm.edu.sa/dept/ics'
- You must specify the complete canonical name of the host server followed by the path of the directory.
e.g.:
www.kfupm.edu.sa/services not www/services - sitesearch allows allows you to specify one directory (and all its sub-directories) as the domain to be searched—you cannot specify multiple disparate directories using this option
KFUPM's Configuration of the Google Search Appliance
KFUPM has customized the Google Search Appliance for our environment. The following changes have been made to the default Google Search Appliance configuration.
Search collection
KFUPM's search collection includes all the web pages in these domains:
- http://www.kfupm.edu.sa
- http://*.kfupm.edu.sa (including most virtual URLs such as help.kfupm.edu.sa)
...that are not specifically excluded by:
- a noindex <meta> tag in the page's HTML
- password (including webauth) protection
- restricted-access files and/or directories
- dynamically-generated content
Web pages excluded by the search administrator
Web pages in the following directories (and their subdirectories) are excluded from the KFUPM search collection:
- Faculty web pages
http://faculty.kfupm.edu.sa - Student web pages
http://student.kfupm.edu.sa - Staff web pages
http://staff.kfupm.edu.sa
These pages have been excluded for a variety of system performance, copyright, license, and University policy reasons.
Crawling schedule
The search appliance has initially been configured to crawl the entire KFUPM web site weekly. If your new page must be included in search results immediately, or if you have questions about the indexing of your content, contact the webmaster.
If you have comments or questions about using Google to power the search feature on your website, contact the webmaster.