Google Webmaster Guidelines > Blog

Google Guidelines are now Officially Updated

October 2nd, 2012 by Patrick Sexton

google guidelines

If you visit the Google help page that lists the Google Webmaster Guidelines, you will see some new things because they are now updated.

Some new guidelines include:

“Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.”

“Don’t deceive your users.”

“Avoid Scraped content”

“Avoid Automatically generated content”

“Monitor your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears”

“Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site”

They have also changed a guideline to include rich-snippets… “Review our recommended best practices for images, video and rich snippets.”

And a new guideline about rich snippets… Avoid the following techniques… “Abusing rich snippets markup”

Over the last few years Google has been making changes to their guidelines and they are constantly improving the clarity and explanations of the help material provided.

This time there are some big changes.

They have simplified the specific quality guidelines and added new help documentation for each… Avoid the following techniques:

  • Automatically generated content
  • Participating in link schemes
  • 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

Engage in good practices like the following:

  • Monitoring your site for hacking and removing hacked content as soon as it appears
  • Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site

I really like this newest version and suggest everyone review the new guidelines. I will post details about the new Google guidelines help documentation as I find them but the new guidelines look great. Simplified and more descriptive. Good stuff.

Read all about it in on the Google Webmaster Central blog

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Author

Patrick Sexton

This blog is written by Patrick Sexton, who has been helping webmasters with the Google Webmaster Guidelines and other issues since 2005.

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