This is my final installment on my overview of the New Webmaster Guidelines. My first post covered Design & Content the second part covered Technical Guidelines.
While the topic of this post is “quality guidelines” it is perhaps the most misunderstood part of the webmaster guidelines as it is open to interpretation; however, the core of the guideline remains the same:
“Don’t engage in tactics that are questionable. If you would be hesitant to explain your actions to a competitor or to Google”
“How would you build and promote you site if there were no search engines?”
While I could go in to specifics on each point, this is an instance where it is best to get the information directly from the source. Google has not really updated anything here, but do state the following suggestions:
DOs
• Make your webpages for your readers; no for Google or other search engines
• Do not deceive your visitors
• Avoid tricks/schemes designed to improve you rankings.
• Focus on what makes your site unique, valuable, or engaging and make it stand apart from others in your field
• Actively monitor your site for hacking and remove hacked content as soon as it appears
• Prevent and removed user-generated spam from your site.
DON’Ts
The clearest recommendations that Google makes to avoid the following practices:
• Automatically generated content
• Link schemes of exchanges
• Cloaking/hidden text or links
• Suspicious redirects
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Send automated queries to Google
Once you have repaired your site and corrected and errors or errors, you can submit a reconsideration request to Google: