Search Marketing Blog
Google Updates Webmaster Guidelines
Yesterday, Google updated their Google Webmaster Guidelines, which provide basic information on how to help Google find, index and rank your site. While most of the quality guidelines are similar to the previous iteration, Google now provides more specific information about illicit practices that may lead to a site being banned or penalized.
Examples of specific guidelines:
1. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages. When evaluating your site to see if it includes hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by visitors of your site. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?”
2. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
“Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines. Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.”
3. Don’t send automated queries to Google.
“Google’s Terms of Service do not allow the sending of automated queries of any sort to our system without express permission in advance from Google.”
4. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
“‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results.”
5. Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
“[I]n some cases, content is deliberately duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or win more traffic.”
6. Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
“Sites that exploit browser security holes to install software (such as malware, spyware, viruses, adware, and trojan horses) are in violation of the Google quality guidelines, and may be removed from Google’s index.”
7. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
“Doorway pages contain many links - often several hundred - that are of little to no use to the visitor, and do not contain valuable content.”
