Google Webmaster Guidelines

What are the Google Webmaster Guidelines? 

Now known as Google Search Essentials, Google Webmaster Guidelines are a set of guidelines and best practices that are recommended by Google to ensure that a website’s content is properly crawled, indexed and ranked. 

The core message of these guidelines are: Focus on the user. 

These guidelines are broken into three categories: 

Technical Requirements 

The minimum technical requirements for a website to show in Google search. These include containing indexable content and returning an HTTP 200 status code.  

Key Best Practices 

A list of main improvements that can help improve a site’s chance of appearing in the SERPs. Documentation from Google includes the following core practices: 

• Focus on writing and publishing helpful, reliable content designed with your audience in mind. Your content should provide real value and address your users’ needs and interests. 

• Incorporate relevant keywords and phrases in prominent locations on your pages, such as the title, main heading, and meta descriptions. Also, use keywords in alt text for images and link text to improve search engine understanding and relevance. 

• Make sure all your links are accessible and crawlable so that Google can easily navigate and discover other pages on your site. This ensures that important content is not overlooked. 

• Share and promote your website. The more people know about your site, the more likely it is to gain traffic and backlinks. 

• If your site includes images, videos, structured data, or JavaScript, make sure you follow best practices for these elements to help Google understand and index your content. 

• Make use of features like rich snippets or structured data to improve how your site appears in Google Search results. 

• If you have content that you don’t want to appear in search results, or if you want to opt out of search indexing entirely, use the appropriate methods to manage how your content is displayed. 

Spam Policies 

These are any behaviours and activities that can lead to penalisation. These are detected through various automated systems and will result in a manual action. This can result in lower rankings or no results or all. These include: 

• Cloaking: This is used to manipulate rankings, such as showing Google one page while showing users another. 

• Doorway Pages: These are low-quality pages created to manipulate search rankings and funnel users to a specific page.  

• Expired Domain Abuse: Using expired domains to gain unfair SEO advantages or to redirect traffic. 

• Hidden Text and Links: Using text or links that are hidden from users but visible to search engines. 

• Keyword Stuffing: Overloading content with keywords to manipulate rankings. 

• Link Spam: Artificially generating or acquiring backlinks through link farms or paid link schemes.  

• Machine-Generated Traffic: Artificially inflating a site’s traffic through bots.  

• Malicious Behaviours: Engaging in practices intended to deceive or manipulate search engines, such as spreading malware or engaging in fraudulent activities.