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Google Webmaster Guidelines For 2020

As per Google Webmaster Guidelines 2018 everyone must know the information we trying to present. – Let’s be realistic, there’s no short-cut to rank higher in search rankings. The only information this article offers is guaranteed best and worst practices on what positively and negatively impacts your search rankings with Google.

Google webmaster guidelines 2020 – updated

Google has a group of webmaster guidelines, these guidelines let users know and make them aware of how to improve their website for search. They recently updated those guidelines, and each time they update their rules, it’s curiously to see what they included and what they changed.

General Guidelines

Following the General Guidelines below will help Google find, index, and rank your site.

1. Help Google find your pages

• Make sure that all pages on the website can be reached by a link from another accessible page. The referring link should include either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is appropriate for the target page.
• Present a sitemap file with links that directs to the vital pages on your site. Also, provide a page with list of links to these pages which is easily read and understood by people.
• Restrict the number of links on a page to adecent number (a few thousand at most).
• Make sure that your web server correctly supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This aspect directs your web server to inform Google if your content has changed since it last crawled your site.
• Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages. Maintain your robots.txt file updated. Learn how to organize crawling with the robots.txt file. Test the coverage and syntax of your robots.txt file using the txt testing tool.

1.1 Ways to help Google find your site:

• Submit your site to Google at http://www.google.com/submityourcontent/.
• Submit a Sitemapusing Google Search Console. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to improve and extend their coverage of your webpages.
• Ensure that any site that should know about your pages is familiar if your site is online.

2. Help Google understand your pages

 elements and alt attributes are illustrative, specific, and correct.

• Generate a useful, information-rich site, and write the content of your pages that clearly and precisely describe your content. Focus on quality content writing.
• Think & consider about the words or keywords users would type to find your pages, and ensure that your site actually comprises those words in it.
• Make sure that your 
• Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.
• Follow our recommended best practices for images, video, and structured data.
• When using a content management system, ensure that it creates pages and links that search engines will be able to crawl.
• To help Google completely understand your site’s contents, allow all site assets that would affect page rendering to be crawled. The Google indexing system depicts a web page just as the user would see it, including images, CSS, and JavaScript files. To look which page assets Google bot is not crawling, or to debug directives in your robots.txt file, use the blocked resources report in Search Console and the Fetch as Google and robots.txt Tester tools.
• Enable search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or URL parameters that track their path through the site. These techniques are helpful when it comes to tracking of individual user behavior, but the observing pattern of bots is very different. Involving these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site.
• Enable your site’s important content is seen to viewers by default. Google can easily go through the hidden HTML content inside navigational elements, however Google considers this content less available to users, and hopes that you will make your most important information visible in the default page view.
•  Ensure that advertisement links on your pages do not affect search engine rankings by making sensible efforts. For example, use robots.txt or rel=”nofollow” to block advertisement links from being followed by a crawler.

3. Help Visitors Use Your Pages

• Try using text instead of images to display important content or links. You must use images in place of textual content, use the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Ensure that all links go to live web pages. Use valid HTML.
• Optimize your page loading times. Quick loading sites make users happy and improve the overall quality of the web. Google recommends you to use tools like PageSpeed Insights and Webpagetest.org to test the overall performance of your page.
• Don’t forget to design your site for every device types including desktops, tablets, and smartphones and also design as per there sizes. Use the mobile friendly testing tool to test the performance of your pages on mobile devices & also get a feedback for the same.
• Make sure that your site appears accurately in different browsers. Responsive web design makes your web page look good on all devices.
• Secure your site’s connections with HTTPS, if possible. Encrypting communication between the user and your website is a good habit when it comes to online interaction.
• Confirm if your pages are helpful & useful for readers with visual impairments.

Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines

In the “Quality Guidelines” segment, the Google webmaster guidelines lists every common types of SERP manipulation. Google also motivates users to report spam sites to the Google anti-spam team, if they observe that another site is abusing the guidelines.

The guidelines below states the most common manipulative practices which may be penalized, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices too which are not listed here.

Basic principles

• Give priority to users over search engines & make pages according to the users.
• Don’t deceive your users.
• Avoid short-cuts & tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good thumb rule is would you feel ease explaining what you have done to your competitor’s website, or to a Google employee. Another helpful test is to question, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
• Explore what will make your website better than the rest & worth engaging, unique or valuable.

Google Webmaster Specific Guidelines

These points will result in negative impact on search rankings, therefore avoid the following techniques:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Taking part in affiliate programs without adding enough value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Forming pages with harmful behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware
• Abusing rich snippetsmarkup
• Sending automated queriesto Google

Follow good practices like these:

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

If your site breaks even one of these guidelines, at that point Google may take manual activity against it. Once you have resolved the problem, you can then submit your site for reconsideration.