Google Updates & Details Webmaster Guidelines

Jun 5, 2007 at 1:19pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Google has just updated their Google Webmaster guidelines page with clearer and more detailed guidelines.

If you scroll down to the quality guidelines portion and the “Quality guidelines – specific guidelines” section, you will notice that those specifics are now hyperlinked to more details.

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don’t send automated queries to Google.
Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

I may update this post with more information, after I dig deeper into the pages and listen to Matt Cutts at Google talk about it on the Penalty Box Summit session at SMX.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Webmaster Central

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

Connect with the author via: Email | Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

crimsongirl

So basically – nothing new?

I mean, this is what we’ve been hearing for years. No changes in tactics needed for SEO types.

The only thing that gets me is “Don’t send automated queries”. How do they know the queries are from the person who owns/controls the site?
http://www.jlh-design.com JLH

Reporting of paid links is new, I think.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66736&topic=8524
http://sebastianx.blogspot.com/2007/06/google-enhances-quality-guidelines.html Sebastian

Yep John, that’s so new that I didn’t (yet) covered it in my first take on the update;) Well, the news is old though, at least when you consider Matt’s blog posts official announcements.

What I like is that the Googlers in charge really tried to write for their audience, that is Webmasters and Web developers, not (only) search geeks. Hence the news is that Google really cares. Since the revamp is a funded project, I guess the few paragraphs where the guidelines are still mysterious for the great unwashed, or even potentially misleading, will get corrected soon.