Google Webmaster Guidelines 2016 - Updated
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The document summarizes Google's updated webmaster guidelines. Some of the new and existing guidelines covered include guidelines around HTTPS, mobile-friendly websites, accessibility, visible content, XML/HTML sitemaps, robots.txt files, titles/alt text, images/videos, structured data, CMS websites, search console tools, paid/affiliate links, and page speed/compatibility. The document also provides more detail on some updated guidelines around HTTPS, mobile SEO, accessibility/usability, and visible content. Existing quality guidelines focus on user-centric content and avoiding thin/scraped content, cloaking, hidden text, and other manipulative techniques.
Google Webmaster Guidelines 2016 - Updated
- 1. Google Webmaster Guidelines - Updated Content ● Existing and updated Google webmaster general guidelines ● Entirely new guidelines ● Existing guidelines in new format ● Guideline on HTTPS ● Guideline on making site mobile-friendly ● Guideline on making website browser compatible ● Guideline on accessibility and usability ● Guideline on using XML & HTML sitemaps ● Guideline on using robots.txt ● Guideline on page hierarchy
- 2. ● Guideline on using titles and alt attributes ● Guideline on optimizing images, videos and structured data ● Guideline on websites created using CMS ● Guideline on using search console tools to find and eliminate various issues ● Guideline on blocking paid or affiliate links on web page ● Guideline on fixing broken links and using valid HTML markup ● Guideline on making website perform faster/load page instantly ● Guideline on links & site structure ● Existing Google webmaster quality guidelines
- 3. Updated Google Webmaster General Guidelines Entirely New Guidelines ● HTTPS Address ● Mobile SEO ● Accessibility/Usability ● Visible Content
- 4. HTTPS Address HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is an internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of your users' data between the user's computer and the site.
- 5. Mobile SEO . Web sites developed to suit all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
- 6. Accessibility/Usability The ease of use of a website. Presentation of visuals elements and textual information in a clear and concise way.
- 7. Visible Content Avoid placing important content within expandable tabs or non visible elements.
- 8. Existing Guidelines In New Format Help Google Find Your Pages Help Google understand your pages Help visitors use your pages
- 9. Use Of The Robots.Txt File On Web Server Google recommends to use the robots.txt file to manage, prevent and limit crawling of unwanted pages and directories on a website.
- 10. Limiting The Number of Links on a Page Google recommends to limit the number of links on a single page to a reasonable number of (a few thousand at most). That is including internal and outgoing (external) links. Earlier, it used to be fewer than this.
- 11. XML Sitemap For (Search Engines) And HTML Sitemap Page Provide sitemaps containing links that point to important web pages. This way, XML sitemap will help Google to learn about the structure of the website and sitemap index file will help users with easy access to pages of interest at one go.
- 12. Easy Access To Pages On A Site Linking with proper anchor text and ALT tags to reach a findable page. Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.
- 13. Descriptive Titles & Alt Attributes Google recommends using titles and alt tags which should be descriptive, specific to content, and accurate.
- 14. Optimizing Images, Videos & Structured Data Images - Use good-quality photos, don't embed private text inside images, use detailed, informative file-name, write detailed alt text, provide useful anchor text, provide good context for image and protect image form being illegally used by third third party.
- 15. Optimizing Videos Add high-quality videos on the website, mark up videos with schema.org, submit a video sitemap or mRSS feed to Google, tell Google when removing videos from your site, create high-quality thumbnail images, flash, and hash tags, create a great user experience.
- 16. Optimizing Structured Data Structured data is used to enhanced presentation of snippets in Search Results, to show answers from the Knowledge Graph. This feature can be primiraly used for organizations, events, movie reviews, and music/video play actions.
- 17. Creating Website Using CMS Whenever creating a website using CMS (content management system) such as wordpress or wix, make sure that the created pages and links are crawalable by search engine.
- 18. Using Search Console Tools To help Google fully understand site's contents, Google recommends us to allow all site assets such as CSS and JavaScript files that affect the understanding of the pages. To see which page assets that Googlebot cannot crawl, or to debug directives in robots.txt file, Google recommends using tools such as Blocked Resources Report, Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester tool.
- 19. Paid Links & Ads on Webpage Links from Google's AdSense ads, DoubleClick links or any third party affilate links are crawled by search engines. In such case, we should block them using either robots.txt file or adding rel="nofollow" attribute to such links on a page to stop search engine from crawling them from the page in question.
- 20. Use Text Instead Of Images To Display Important Names, Content, Or Links or if you must use images for textual content, use the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
- 21. Ensure All Links On A Webpage Point To Live Webpages And Use Valid HTML Check for broken links on a site and also the validation of HTML coding of the website.
- 22. Webpage Speed Google recommends to optimize loading time of pages on a website as fast web pages make users happy (especially for those users with slow Internet connections). We can test speed performance of a webpage using tools like PageSpeed Insights and Webpagetest.org.
- 23. Browser Compatibility Test site in as many browsers as possible, write good, clean HTML, specify your character encoding, consider accessibility.
- 24. Existing Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines The existing Google webmaster quality guidelines primarily include two points: What basic techniques/practices to follow and What techniques to avoid
- 25. What Basic Techniques/Practices To Follow ● Make pages primarily for users that will ultimately result in good search engines ranking ● Don't use deceptive practices like sending a user somewhere they don't want to go, untruthful or misleading content, purposely duplicate content and doorway pages, ● Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?”
- 26. What Basic Techniques/Practices To Follow ● Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field ● Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears ● Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site
- 27. What Techniques To Avoid Avoid auto generated pages/content Auto-generated content is content that has been generated programmatically. Often this will consist of paragraphs of random text that make no sense to the reader but which may contain search keywords. This includes text translated by an automated tool, generated through automated processes, generated from scraping and combining content from different web pages.
- 28. Avoid Link Schemes Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results through illegitimate practices such as buying/selling of links, excessive link exchanges, large-scale article marketing/guest blogging or using automated programs to create links.
- 29. Avoid Thin Content Avoid creating pages with little or no original content.
- 30. Don't Cloak and Avoid Sneaky Redirects Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Examples of cloaking include: Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images or Flash to users and inserting text or keywords into a page only when the User-agent requesting the page is a search engine, not a human visitor.
- 31. Don't Use Hidden Text And Links Hiding text or links in content is seen as deceptive practice. Examples: Using same font text and background color, placing text behind images, or off-screen, settng very small font size or hiding a link by only linking one character, etc.
- 32. Avoid Doorway Pages Doorway pages or sites are created to rank highly for specific search queries. They are bad for users because they can lead to multiple similar pages in user search results. Example: Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, substantially similar pages that are closer to search results than a clearly defined, etc.
- 33. Don't Use Scraped Content Some examples of scraping include: sites that copy and republish content from other sites without adding any original content or value, Sites that reproduce content feeds from other sites without providing some type of unique organization or benefit to the user and sites dedicated to embedding content such as video, images, or other media from other sites without substantial added value to the user.
- 34. Dont't Use Affiliate Programs Without Adding Sufficient Value To The Pages Typically, affiliate websites feature product descriptions that appear on sites across that affiliate network. As a result, sites featuring mainly content from affiliate networks can suffer in Google's search rankings, because they do not have enough unique content that differentiates them from other sites on the web.
- 35. Don't Create Pages With Irrelevant Keywords Stuffing webpages with irrelevant keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results can harm your site's ranking.
- 36. Don't Add Malware/Badware Such As Viruses, Trojans, or Other Badware
- 37. Don't Abuse Rich Snippets Markup With Misleading or False Information
- 38. What If Your Site Has Violated Webmaster Guidelines And How To Overcome It Google may take manual action against websites that violate its webmaster guidelines. Once you fix the problems, you can submit your site for reconsideration using Google search console help.
- 39. Resources Official Search Console Help https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en Search Engine Roundtable https://www.seroundtable.com/changes-in-the-google-webmaster-guidelines- 21551.html Search Engine Roundtable https://www.seroundtable.com/google-revamps-webmaster-guidelines-21547.html Yoast SEO https://yoast.com/google-webmaster-guidelines-update/ Varvy https://varvy.com/
- 40. By Sher Bahadur Thapa