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If you’re a reader of our blog, spend a lot of time on marketing news sites, or try to keep up with search trends, you’ve heard about Google’s quality guidelines. Sometimes, people leak new, suspected guidelines when a significant algorithm update is released or a New Year rolls around. Usually though, you can go straight to the source for these best practices.

Google’s quality guidelines, or Webmaster Guidelines, are made readily available here. If you are unfamiliar with their quality guidelines, we suggest following the above link. This is a lot of information, even if you are familiar with these. We’ll break down some of the most important guidelines you should be sure to follow on your site and in your marketing practices. Each section below is broken down the same as their guide for easy reference.

Design and Content Guidelines

Google’s first section of quality guidelines are focused around site design and content. Logically, it makes the most sense for a site to focus on their design and content before jumping into anything else. The guide starts with the basics first, such as a logical hierarchy of links for your site. This means all pages should link accordingly, and be accessible, from one single, sensible link, not multiple or variable URLs for a single page. Oftentimes, site owners have trouble determining the flow of their site. This is where a sitemap really helps. Here, you can organize your site as it is designed, and as it should be crawled and indexed. For more information on sitemaps, SEO and XML, you can visit our blog about site audits.

Next, Google is clear to mention quality content for search. This may seem basic, as they stress making sure you include words in your site’s content that people use to find you. Many times, site owners include vanity keywords. These are keywords they believe they should rank for, rather than what they are really capable of ranking for. This is where knowing your audience is key – you need to give them what they are looking for in an effort to be the best possible search result among millions.

Finally, Google goes on to encourage using more text than images to display important information. This is a good suggestion, since Google’s bots cannot read the context of images. Despite this suggestion, you can use alt. tags, or alternate tags, to help the search engines understand the intent of your images. You shouldn’t rely on just images to convey your message, but adding alt. tags to images is the best way to ensure Google will be able to “read” your images.

Technical Guidelines

The next section is largely technical. These are all of the aspects that ensure the backend of your site is running smoothly. Usually, these don’t have a ton of user-facing aspects, but good practices here allow you to be as visible as possible on the SERPs (search engine results pages). All aspects of your site, both backend and frontend, need to work in perfect harmony to make sure your site is visible. Technical mistakes that may seem unimportant, or too confusing to implement, can end up having a large impact on your site in the long run.

The most significant guideline for this section are for robots.txt files, which allow you to add directives for bots to crawl and index your site. Webmasters have the option to implement “nofollow” and noindex” tags on certain pages of their sites. Usually, these are best suited for checkout pages or account login pages that provide no real value to users if they appear in the SERPs. Sometimes, these tags get added to pages you want indexed unintentionally; the can also be tacked on to robots.txt files as an oversight, so you need to be careful when implementing them. Robots.txt files are HTML files added to your server that outline directives for any crawlers. This applies to both SEO tools crawlers and search engine spiders. Properly writing and implementing robots.txt files can be the difference between visibility and invisibility online.

To ensure your robots.txt files are implemented correctly, there are lots of guides and tools you can use to test how your site appears in indexing. Your WMT (Webmaster Tools) dashboard has a site crawl section where you can fetch as Google and test your robots.txt files among other important tests. We highly recommending testing and monitoring your site’s technical elements regularly for the best results.

Quality Guidelines

This final section is really the most important, and sometimes the most ignored, by website owners and webmasters. Google sets such strict quality guidelines for a good reason. As a search engine, and a powerful business, their goal is to provide users with the best possible answer to their query. Sites that are low-quality and overly-spammy send low trust signals to, not only that site, but Google’s service as well. To protect their good name, they must implement guidelines for exceptional user experience. As a business, they want users to keep coming back to use their product.

With this in mind, if you want Google to extent their services to include your site, you must earn it. The basic principles of their quality guidelines are pretty easy to follow when you keep your users in mind. This is the most important part of their guidelines – your website pages are for your users. They go on to state you shouldn’t try to trick or game the search engines’ algorithms to gain rankings, participate in link schemes, cloak keywords, use sneaky redirects, or scraped content to gain position on the SERPs. These are all things that end up being common sense if you put your users first.

These guidelines apply to everything you do on the internet. Any content you write should be for the benefit of your users. You want to make sure you are standing out in the crowd of millions of other websites – quality content gives you this edge. Also, making sure your links are good quality helps to direct the kind of traffic you want to your site. Remember, it’s not about volume of links anymore, it’s about quality and relevancy for your users.

We hope we helped to simplify some of Google’s more technical guidelines into something that makes perfect sense. As an online business, you really need to be aware of your online presence. Even if Google didn’t hold almost 70% of the market share for search engines, you should still follow quality guidelines for your users. Your site is built to provide users with a product. To do this effectively, and see a good ROI, your site needs to meet quality guidelines. Once you begin building, writing, and marketing your site with quality and best practices in mind, you’ll see there’s no other way to be online.