Google’s Webmaster Guidelines are rules setup by Google to help webmasters take actions that make their websites easier to crawl and get included in the Google search index. Additionally, the webmaster guidelines list practices which will negatively impact your search engine ranking results, causing a devaluation of a website, up to full exclusion from Google’s search results.
Let’s be realistic, there’s no magic trick to score high in search rankings. The only information this article offers is guaranteed best and worst practices on what positively and negatively impacts your search rankings with Google. Below, you’ll find full Google guidelines in an easy, compact list with references to the full articles from Google.
Positive Impact on Search Rankings
- Learn what meta tags Google understands.
- For images, keep alt tags short, file names descriptive, don’t use text within images, align and resize appropriately, keep near relevant text, compress the size, and make sure they’re of decent quality.
- Keep URL structures short, simple, and human readable. Avoid long strings and hard to understand hierarchies.
- For videos, consider Schema video markup for formatting, have a video sitemap, use decent quality thumbnails, post with simple JavaScript / Flash, and content related to the video on such pages.
- Avoid duplicate URLs, or consolidate identical pages. Google will only index one.
- Use rel=”nofollow” where appropriate to not pass authority to irrelevant or unrelated websites.
- Limit use of AJAX and try to leverage it for accessibility for your visitors.
- Not necessary, but try to use rel=”prev” and rel=”next” to indicate paginated content to Google.
- Prevent comment spam, and protect your website from losing page authority and sharing malicious material.
- Report unfair paid and spam links, since these websites are cheating to score higher than you on searches.
Negative Impact on Search Rankings
- Automatically generated content such as paragraphs, often unreadable to humans.
- Sneaky redirects by sending visitors to a page other than the one they’ve requested.
- Large scale link schemes involving buying, selling, or exchanging links to pass unnatural page rank.
- Serving human visitors different content than what Google sees, also known as cloaking.
- Using hidden text and links on pages that pass page rank which only Google can see, but not a human visitor.
- Creating doorway pages (also known as click funneling, or creating pages for the purpose of landing a visitor on a specific page). Multiple domains routing traffic from specific cities to a page is also part of this scheme.
- Scraped content copied from other websites without adding any real value.
- Websites built solely for affiliate programs without adding any real value or commentary.
- Keyword stuffing your website pages with irrelevant keywords that don’t relate to the page content.
- Creating pages with malicious behavior such as downloading unwanted files, changing a users’ homepage, installing malware, pop-up or swapping ads, or other odd behavior.
- Creating accounts on websites for the sole purpose of spreading your links, known as user generated spam.