Let's Talk About Google's Webmaster Guidelines

Here's a little video directly from Google. Might want to watch it. Here's a link to Google's little page describing webmaster guidelines. While it seems to be unclear to some, I thought it would be pertinent to this blog to reiterate these guidelines and talk about what it means for SEO. First, let's take a look at the basic principles outlined on the page. Seems fairly straightforward, right? Obviously not with the overabundance of misdirection and chicanery that seems to permeate the World Wide Web. Honesty does not seem to be the policy for most webmasters, but I digress. Here's the basic guidelines or the 'core' of the principles that Google expects webmasters to uphold taken directly from Google.

Basic principles

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Don't deceive your users.
• 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?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.

Not so hard to grasp, now is it? Basically, what search engines want is to return the most relevant result for any given search. Not weak, watered-down copy content flooded with ads. Relevant content seems to be quite lacking these days all over the Internet. When the search providers are so upfront about what they expect, why are there so many highly successful content marketing firms out there? That is a very good question and Google, for one, is taking steps to clean them up.

Here are some more specific, or exact, practices that Google lays out in plain English that seems to evade the minds of a lot of people trying to play the SEO game. Again, this is taken verbatim from Google.

Specific guidelines

Avoid the following techniques:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

 It appears, to me at least, that Google is actually telling webmasters how to properly do SEO. Right. They are doing just that. So, why not just listen? The answer should be quite obvious, especially for local businesses that depend on long-term success on the World Wide Web. The basic rule is to be honest and design your marketing strategies to enhance user experience and stop trying to manipulate the search index.

I know, this is a last minute post and it kind of, sort of touches on exactly what the last post did. But, I feel like it is an important message for SEO in general.