Google’s Quality Guidelines

Google may not be the only game in town, but if you are serious about your SEO it is the biggest and best game available. A large part of that is due to the fact that Google has a set of quality guidelines for the webmasters and if you are serious about ranking your site well, you are going to make sure that you abide by these guidelines to the last detail. Google plainly lays out  to website owners of all types of malpractices that try to deceive the users as well as the search engines so that they are well known and accepted as forbidden. If a site owner engages in any manipulative practices, it can result in the site being banned by Google. As Google accounts for about 80% of the online search engine users, that is an extreme price to pay for what is often a minor boost at best.

Google strongly advises that web pages are made to satisfy users and not search engines because it is the users of your website who is going to benefit from your website. This is a matter of giving the customer what they are looking for without any trickery. Search engines are platforms that bring your website to the user and in order to provide the users with the right kind of information, not the end user to be catered to. Therefore, your website needs to be developed to please the users, not the algorithms at play with the SERPs.

The quality guidelines Google employs clearly state not to take part in any link schemes that are created for no purpose but to increase your website’s ranking. If you are found to be associated with bad SEO schemes online, then your website may lose its ranking. You must be careful about who you are linking to and how you are linking to them which is why SEO firms are so invaluable – the good ones never get you sandboxed.

If you are thinking about sneaky black hat redirects then you need to start thinking of other approaches that will not put your site to trouble. Black hat SEO always comes back to bite you sooner or later. Your website cannot  have any hidden text or any links. If you have hidden text, it is not going to be viewed by users, but it is put their precisely for the search engines and this gives a good reason for Google to sandbox you. Anytime you buck the Google quality standards you risk getting your site penalized or banned – it is that simple.

Another important quality guideline from Google is not to load your pages with keyword stuffed content that is of little or no use to your visitors. If you have this problem, the best way to tackle it is to be natural with the content you provide. Your content is what tells to your visitors what you have to offer them. When you spam out irrelevant keywords it is going to degrade the user experience. This will in turn get your website’s ranking pulled down.

Filling the web space with duplicate content is totally against Google’s quality guidelines as well. Never fill up domains and sub-domains with duplicate content. If at some point there is a need for adding sub-domains,  use fresh or unique content every time. These are just some of the basic quality guidelines clearly spelled out by Google. if you ignore them, you do so at your own peril.

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