If you have a Google Webmaster and go to the tools’ section, you will see that the search engine king highlights a long list of quality guidelines. They mainly describe the “what not to do” on your website. Over the years, bad online marketers have used non ethical and unreliable methods to attempt to trick Google and other search engines. Some of these tricks may have worked for a few weeks or months but, eventually, it always backfired and the poor site owner was left with a website tagged as poor, deceptive, and not worth ranking by Google. Let’s not do that and instead review together their quality guidelines.

=1= When creating pages, you should do so with your visitors in mind first.

=2= Do not do anything that may deceive your online visitors. Google is very smart and will catch on to you quickly.

=3= Stay away from any so-called SEO tricks which are supposed to improve your rankings by outsmarting search engines . In their guidelines, Google suggests that if this is something you would not be comfortable explaining to a Google employee, simply don’t do it.

=4= When developing your site both visually and in content, make it unique and valuable. Google’s crawler is looking for valuable and fresh content so make sure your site delivers on both.

=5= DO NOT DO THE FOLLOWING:

• Use programs that automatically generates content
• Be part of “farm linking”
• Have pages that have not textual content
• Do not “cloack“. Cloaking is the act of showing to search engines different content that the one you show to visitors. This is a big penalty that would most likely result in your website and domain de-indexed for a very long time.
• Do not do what Google refers to as “sneaky redirects“. Though redirecting when changing your domain and other similar reasons is fine; redirecting a search engine bot so that it “sees” different content is just like cloaking and absolutely forbidden.
• Do not hide text stuffed with keywords by making it white font on white background or 1 pixel small. The bot will know!
• Do not build “doorway websites” and pages which used to be the technique of choice for marketers. They are pages or sites focused on one keyword which then redirect to the main site.
• Another bad idea is to use content from multiple sites to build your own content. This is called scraping and again a deceptive method highly penalized.
• Affiliate programs can bring much needed revenue to your site but make sure it makes sense to your visitors. Having an advertisement for shoes when you are an IT consultant just does not make sense.
• Keywords stuffing especially when these words have little to do with your site’ textual content is also a big no-no.
• Having pages on which you (or a hacker) store viruses, trojans, or malware is of course cause for your site to not only be de-indexed but also tagged by the search engines as being “dangerous” and infected.
• Rich snippets markup is a newer concept these past few years but Google wants to make sure you do not over do it and use too many of them.
• Finally automating submissions fro indexation to Google is frown upon.

As you can see their list of don’ts is quite long but, in truth, they all make sense. Google is in the business of delivering quality content to their users and, by setting high standards for websites, it assures that it can do its job.

For more on the Google’s Quality Guidelines, watch our 15-minute video by clicking PLAY.