Basic and Specific Quality Guidelines to Help Your Site Get Indexed

Creating a quality website that will stand up to any standard should be any website owner’s goal. The Internet is reaching a point where it will be more and more challenging to “hide” techniques (good or bad) from users particularly digital natives who are growing up in this Internet environment like fish to water. Here are some of Google’s guidelines to consider as you build your quality website.

Basic Principles to guide you as you build your website:

• Be user friendly – create pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Be credible and don’t deceive your users.
• Be user helpful – Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Be unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field but offering more than what’s already out there.

Specific Guidelines and Techniques to Avoid:

• Auto generated content containing keywords but makes no sense
• Participating in link schemes like buying and selling links to increase Page Rank, Excessive link exchange, and other unnecessary links
• Cloaking is a violation of Google Webmaster Guidelines because it provides users with results other than they expected
• Sneaky redirects or sending users to a different url is deceptive
• Hidden text or links (font colors, behind image, etc.) that send users to other urls is also deceptive
• Doorway pages that funnel users to sites or pages you want to send traffic to.
• Scraped content copied from other sites without adding any original content or value
• Websites stuffed with affiliate programs alone without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords to manipulate pagerank
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware without the user’s consent
• Abusing rich snippets markup or manipulating code to mislead users
• Sending automated queries to Google is not allowed
• 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

Adhering to these basic and specific guidelines will help you build a website that will not only be beneficial to the website owner but to the whole Internet community as well.

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