Webmaster Guidelines

These guidelines are split roughly into three areas: technical requirements (a site needs to be crawlable and free of major technical barriers to even be considered), spam policies (the explicit list of manipulative practices — cloaking, link schemes, keyword stuffing, and others — that can trigger a manual action), and general quality guidance describing what Google considers helpful, reliable content. Reading Search Essentials directly is worth doing periodically, since it's updated over time to reflect current policy, and it's the most authoritative, primary source available — more reliable than secondhand summaries or outdated advice that may no longer reflect current guidance.

Example

A content team periodically reviews Google's Search Essentials documentation directly rather than relying solely on older SEO blog posts that may reference outdated guidance no longer current.

Related terms

• Manual Action (Google Penalty)
• Quality Raters Guidelines
• Algorithm Update
• Keyword Stuffing
• Cloaking