Google Guidelines

In search engine optimization, the world's leading search engine Google plays a significant role. In particular, the SEO guidelines issued by the company are important. The Google Guidelines, also known as Webmaster Guidelines, are authoritative for webmasters, designers, programmers, and web writers. They include requirements for various areas of search engine optimization. And since Google is the most important search engine, with a market share of almost 90% in Germany, one wants to adhere to these requirements.

The crawler (Googlebot) searches the World Wide Web and indexes pages. The Google algorithm includes about 200 criteria for ranking websites. A website that meets the guidelines has a higher chance of top positions than one that disregards the guidelines.

What do the Google Guidelines contain?

Specifically, the Google Guidelines cover two major areas:

• Technical guidelines

• Quality guidelines for good content

In detail, the guidelines provide information about the structure of a website, the importance of search terms, and the design of links.

Technical Google Guidelines

The technical accessibility of the website is a major component of the Google Guidelines, in which the company provides information aimed at improving indexing. The goal is to create informative websites that offer added value to the user and are also flawlessly accessible. To achieve this, websites must, among other things, have error-free source code and fast loading times according to the guidelines. In this context, the robots.txt file is relevant for website operators. With it, you can inform the crawler which URLs on a website the bots should access. It is also important that every link has a target and that the visitor does not encounter an HTML error code 404 for pages not found.

Quality guidelines

These Google Guidelines represent the essence of what the search engine rewards: good content. According to these guidelines, web content should primarily be created for users, not for search engines. Spam measures like keyword stuffing should be avoided. Many updates like the Panda or Penguin Update, as well as the Helpful Content Update, aimed to focus on high-quality content and combat over-optimized sites. The quality initiative doesn't stop at link building either. Backlinks should primarily be generated naturally. In other words: The content on a page is so good that others are happy to give a recommendation for it and set a link. Link exchanges and link purchases, however, violate the Webmaster Guidelines. If done excessively, this can lead to a penalty.

Best Practices Guidelines: a few criteria of the Google algorithm

John Mueller, Senior Search Analyst at Google, also repeatedly provides small best practice tips on what SEO measures should be based on. Of course, it never gets completely concrete—the full algorithm remains a company secret. But a few factors regarding the Google Guidelines would be:

• Content should be trustworthy and user-oriented

• Identified keywords should be placed at the appropriate positions on a page (body text, H1 heading, H2 subheadings, alt texts, captions, URL, page title, meta description)

• Community activity for backlink generation

• Clear website structure

• Clear URLs

• Optimization of loading speed (image optimization, browser caching)

• Responsive Design (Mobile First)

The Guideline Super-GAU: Hands off Black Hat SEO

The measures of search engine optimization known as Black Hat SEO massively violate the Google Guidelines. These include manipulative techniques such as cloaking and doorway pages. Duplicate content (i.e., copied web content) also flagrantly violates the search engine's guidelines.

Violations of Google guidelines are penalized

That a page slips in the ranking can occur in two ways: on the one hand, through the workings of the algorithm, but also through manual penalties for violating the Webmaster Guidelines. The former can be easily fixed when SEO specialists review their measures and correct errors. The second form of Google penalty is more severe, as it can only be manually remedied again after the website operator has resolved the violations. In the worst case, it may even happen that a page is completely removed from the index.

The Google Guidelines are updated at regular intervals. Typically, the adjustments to the guidelines are related to updates of the search algorithm, such as the Penguin or Panda Update. Recently, the search engine giant has been expanding its requirements particularly regarding high-quality web content to improve results for the user.