If you’re a website owner, tend to keep up with search trends, or spend a lot of time on brand marketing, you might have heard about Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. The regulations offer guidance on how websites can be optimized and rank on the search results. On the other hand, these guidelines also define what web spam actually is and what consequences one can face when violating the guidelines.
It is an effective source for marketers to comprehend what they should do or shouldn’t to increase the chances of growth in terms of traffic, ranking and revenue. In order to bring optimum results, you need to pay close attention to ‘General and Quality Guidelines,’ which help users to prevent unethical practices that may vanish their site entirely from the Google index or cause serious impact by an algorithmic action.
The regulations of Google search engine for webmasters also known as Google SEO guidelines. Google Guidelines are comprised of two core sections, which include:
1. General Guidelines:
The General Guidelines are crucial because Google clearly says that focusing on them eventually help Google find, index and rank your site, web page or content. This breaks into three major sections that can be briefly elaborated as crawling, indexing, and usability. In the indexing area, Google allow webmasters to understand what they can do to get recognized well and index content.
It is advisable to use relevant title tags for site and ALT tags for an image, alongside searching properly for suitable keywords. The usability area covers the actions that can help to serve a secure use of the website, including mobile site optimization, website overall performance such as loading speed
2. Quality Guidelines:
The Quality Guidelines are designed to clear that SEO experts shouldn’t use unlawful practices or exploit bugs in the domain. It emphasizes on following principles of quality guidelines to put forward the best and unique site from the rest.
Under ‘concrete recommendations’ several spam methods are defined that may lead to violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. It counts several measures such as cloaking of link exchange programs, duplicate content or other spams.
This guide will further cover central factors of website optimization and several tips that can help to improve site ranking.
What is the Main Purpose of Guidelines for Webmasters?
With the introduction of these guidelines, it clears the fact that people who follow these regulations they can expect their website to not being penalized and will ultimately obtain good rankings. The broader purpose of the guide is to show that search engines incline more towards ‘good or quality websites’ in the search results. It allows marketers to understand what they can do in online marketing and what they cannot.
General Guidelines
Help Google Find Your Website
- You need to make sure that all the pages on the website carries another accessible page that may include either suitable images, text or ALT attribute.
- You can send a sitemap to Google that offers links to all crucial pages on your website. When you incorporate new content into the site, you can either resend the whole sitemap or individual pages.
- Google clears the phrase crawl budget, which is a number of pages Googlebot will likely crawl on the mentioned day. If your website has a low crawl budget, then pages aren’t going to be crawled as frequently as expected. People who own a small website should think less than 1000 pages and shouldn’t be concerned about crawl budget. However, if one owns a large website, they need to ensure robots.txt file instructs Googlebot to just crawl the suitable pages on the website.
- While it is necessary to incorporate links into a web page, Google says that the links should be reasonable which means don’t add too many but the most relevant ones.
Help Google Understand Your Pages
- You should develop information-rich and comprehensive pages that accurately elaborate your content.
- One should focus on the words that people are actually looking for and ensure that your site involve those words.
- You should make the best use of ALT attributes and title tag to explain the content.
- Images should be uploaded with titles and descriptive file names, which might allow your site images to rank on image search.
- You should focus on using structured data markup to let Googlebot comprehend your pages’ content.
- Websites using JavaScript and CSS should improve their user experience and improve the areas that may cause an obstacle in understanding of web pages.
Help Visitors Use Your Pages
- You should make the use of text rather than images to highlight important names, links or content.
- Avoid having broken links that no longer exist for some reason.
- You should optimize your site’s loading speed. Google suggest SEOs to use tools such as Page Speed Insights and Web Page Test to evaluate the page performance.
- Your web pages should be easily compatible with all devices – desktops, smartphones and tablets.
- Make sure to use secure connections with HTTP to enhance your interactions.
Quality Guidelines
Webmasters are recommended to act by the regulations to allow their content or pages gain organic ranking and to avoid penalty. It is all about following the principles instead of seeking escapes to exploit. The principles include:
- Focus on creating content for users, not search engines.
- Avoid using unlawful practices to enhance rankings as it is certainly not a great idea.
- Think about what makes your site different, engaging or valuable from the others.
Avoid using the following tactics:
- Copied or duplicate content
- Participation in link schemes
- Tricky redirects
- Cloaking
- Hide text or links
- Pages with inappropriate keywords
- Making pages with malicious behavior such as installing trojans, viruses, etc.
If you’d like to discuss General Guidelines or other elements regarding SEO and how your business can do well, connect with us. Staying up on the top of what’s happening around in the digital era brings positive results.
