In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should block indexing of internal search results because these pages were considered search spam. In 2020, Google rescinded this standard (and open-sourced its code), and now treats it as a hint rather than a directive. To fully ensure that a page is not indexed, a page-level robots meta tag should be included.
There are a variety of ways to improve the prominence of a web page in search results. Cross-linking between pages on the same website to provide links to more important pages may improve its visibility. Page design makes users trust the website and want to stay after finding it. When people leave the website, it is bad for the website and affects its credibility. Writing content that contains frequently searched keyword phrases to be relevant to various search queries tends to increase traffic. Updating content so that search engines crawl back frequently can increase the authority of the website. Adding relevant keywords to the metadata of the web page (including title tags and meta descriptions) tends to improve the relevance of the website's search listings, thereby increasing traffic. URL canonicalization of web pages that are accessible through multiple URLs using the canonical link element or through 301 redirects can help ensure that links pointing to different versions of the URL are counted towards the page's link popularity score. These are called inbound links, and they point to the URL and can count towards the page's link popularity score, affecting the credibility of the website.
SEO techniques can be divided into two categories: those recommended by search engine companies as part of good design ("white hat"), and those that search engines do not approve of ("black hat"). Search engines try to minimize the effects of the latter, which includes spam phone number thailand indexing. Industry commentators categorize these methods and the practitioners who use them as white hat SEO or black hat SEO. White hat SEO tends to produce effects that last a long time, while black hat SEOs expect that their sites may eventually be temporarily or permanently banned once search engines discover what they are doing.