Google guidelines

Google Webmaster Guidelines define requirements for content, technology, and quality. Those who follow them are crawled more easily and ranked better; Black-hat tricks like cloaking or keyword stuffing risk penalties up to deindexing.

The search engine Google, which has been online under this name since 1998, is considered the gold standard in online marketing and especially in search engine optimization. In Germany alone, the search engine has a market share of nearly 92 percent. It is particularly important to follow Google's Webmaster Guidelines if a website is to be successfully placed in the search engine ranking. The company from Mountain View, USA, itself states that by adhering to the Google Guidelines, a website can be "more easily found, indexed, and placed."

The specifications from the Google guidelines

The Google Webmaster Guidelines are divided into three main areas: design and content, technology, and quality. There are specific requirements for each area that the search engine considers clean and recommendable. Other practices to boost websites in search results – such as keyword stuffing – are referred to as Black Hat SEO and sanctioned accordingly. Among the guidelines are tips for creating content, designing text and static links, as well as technical requirements like robots.txt to enable the Google Bot to index the websites.

For most website operators, and especially online marketing or SEO agencies, the quality guidelines of the Google guidelines are of great importance. This involves various techniques that should definitely be avoided. Among other things, the Google guidelines list cloaking, link exchange programs, automatically generated content, and automatically created queries. The search engine wants to prevent irrelevant websites that provide no added value to the user from appearing in search results for a query. It is important that users are not misled or deceived about the purpose of a website, says the Google guidelines. The listing of some methods to manipulate search results does not exclude the possibility that measures can also be taken with other techniques. In the worst case, this could involve a de-indexing, which results in the complete exclusion of a website from the index.

Regular adjustments of the Google guidelines

As with the search engine algorithm, the company also makes regular adjustments to the Google guidelines. This is in response to developments in the SEO and online marketing industry that may involve manipulative methods. It is therefore essential for a website operator to closely monitor the changes to prevent a loss in ranking.