What Are Google Webmaster Guidelines?

Date First Published: 8th January 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what Google Webmaster Guidelines is in this article.

Google Webmaster Guidelines are the guidelines which cover best practices for Google finding, indexing, and ranking a website. These guidelines provide website owners with guidance on how websites can be optimised for Google without penalties and which consequences website owners will face if they violate the guidelines. The three main categories of guidelines are technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices.

Understand Google's guidelines can help avoid Google penalties and avoid future issues to a website, such as decreased organic traffic. It is also important to review the guidelines on a regular basis as Google does update them.

Not all violations of the guidelines will result in penalties. For example, not following the technical requirements will result in issuing with indexing and crawling, but not a penalty. The same goes with key best practices. Not following the key best practices will not be good for the performance of a website in the Google search results, but will not result in a Google penalty. Google penalties are only issued for violating the spam policies, which are listed below.

What Are The Categories Of Google Webmaster Guidelines?

The categories of Google Webmaster Guidelines are:

Technical requirements

Technical requirements cover the bare minimum that Google needs from a webpage to be able to show it in the search results. Most sites already pass the technical requirements without knowing it and there are very few technical things that website owners must do to a webpage to make it eligible for showing up in the search results. The technical requirements are:

• Ensuring that Googlebot is not blocked and can access and find the page.
• Ensuring that the page works as Google only indexes pages that return a 200 HTTP status code, not client and server error pages, like error 404.
• Ensuring that the page has indexable content. This may include ensuring that the file type is supported by Google and is not against Google's spam policies.

Note:

For more information on technical requirements, see the article about technical SEO.

Spam policies

Spam policies cover the techniques that can cause a page to be ranked lower or deindexed from Google. The main purpose of the spam policies are to help protect users and the quality of the search results. In order to be eligible to show up in Google search results, the content should not violate Google's spam policies. Spam can be detected by automated systems and members of Google's team, which can result in a manual action. Google's policies cover common forms of spam, including:

• Cloaking
• Doorway pages
• Hacked content
• Hidden text and links
• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes
• Malware and malicious content
• Misleading functionality
• Abusive scraping
• Sneaky redirects
• Spammy auto-generated content
• User-generated spam
• Thin affiliate pages
• Thin content

Key best practices

Key best practices cover the core practices that can help improve the performance of a website in the Google search results. These include:

• Creating helpful and reliable content
• Making links crawlable so that Google can find other pages on a website.
• Using words that people would use to look for content and using those placing those words in prominent locations.
• Enhancing how a website appears on Google by enabling features that make sense for the site.
• Blocking content that shouldn't appear in the Google search results using the appropriate method, such as the noindex tag.