1/17/2021 Webmaster Guidelines | Google Search Central | Google Developers

Webmaster Guidelines

Webspam Content Violations

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

We strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the Quality Guidelines below, which outline some of the illicit practices
that may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam
action. If a site has been affected by a spam action, it may no longer show up in results on Google.com or on any of Google's
partner sites.

General Guidelines

 Help Google nd your pages

Ensure that all pages on the site can be reached by a link from another ndable page. The referring link should include
either text or, for images, an alt attribute, that is relevant to the target page. Crawlable links are <a> tags with an href

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attribute (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/links-crawlable).

Provide a sitemap le (http://sitemaps.org) with links that point to the important pages on your site. Also provide a page with
a human-readable list of links to these pages (sometimes called a site index or site map page).

Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).

Make sure that your web server correctly supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature directs your web
server to tell Google if your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you
bandwidth and overhead.

Use the robots.txt le on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of in nite spaces such as
search result pages. Keep your robots.txt le up to date. Learn how to manage crawling with the robots.txt le
 (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/faq). Test the coverage and syntax of your robots.txt le
using the robots.txt testing tool (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/robots-testing-tool).

Ways to help Google nd your site:

Ask Google to crawl your pages (/search/docs/advanced/crawling/ask-google-to-recrawl).

Make sure that any sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

 Help Google understand your pages

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to nd your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words
within it.

Ensure that your <title> elements and alt attributes are descriptive, speci c, and accurate.

Design your site to have a clear conceptual page hierarchy.

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Follow our recommended best practices for images (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/google-images), video

 (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/video), and structured data (https://developers.google.com/structured-data/).

When using a content management system (for example, Wix or WordPress), make sure that it creates pages and links that
search engines can crawl.

To help Google fully understand your site's contents, allow all site assets that would signi cantly affect page rendering to
be crawled: for example, CSS and JavaScript les that affect the understanding of the pages. The Google indexing system
renders a web page as the user would see it, including images, CSS, and JavaScript les. To see which page assets that
Googlebot cannot crawl use the URL Inspection tool (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289); to debug
directives in your robots.txt le, use the robots.txt Tester (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062598) tool.

Allow search bots to crawl your site without session IDs or URL parameters that track their path through the site. These
techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these
techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but
actually point to the same page.

Make your site's important content visible by default. Google is able to crawl HTML content hidden inside navigational
elements such as tabs or expanding sections, however we consider this content less accessible to users, and believe that
you should make your most important information visible in the default page view.

Make a reasonable effort to ensure that advertisement links on your pages do not affect search engine rankings. For
example, use robots.txt (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449), rel="nofollow", or rel="sponsored" to
prevent advertisement links from being followed by a crawler.

 Help visitors use your pages

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. If you must use images for textual content,
use the alt attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

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Ensure that all links go to live web pages. Use valid HTML (https://validator.w3.org/).

Optimize your page loading times. Fast sites make users happy and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for
those users with slow Internet connections). Google recommends that you use tools like PageSpeed Insights
 (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) and Webpagetest.org (http://www.webpagetest.org/) to test the
performance of your page.

Design your site for all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Use the mobile friendly
testing tool (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly) to test how well your pages work on mobile devices, and get
feedback on what needs to be xed.

Ensure that your site appears correctly in different browsers (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/browser-compatibility).

If possible, secure your site's connections (/search/docs/advanced/security/https) with HTTPS. Encrypting interactions

between the user and your website is a good practice for communication on the web.

Ensure that your pages are useful for readers with visual impairments, for example, by testing usability with a screen-
reader.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond
negatively to other misleading practices not listed here. It's not safe to assume that just because a speci c deceptive technique
isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Website owners who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic
principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time
looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please let us know by ling a spam report
 (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport). Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems,

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and will use the report for further improving our spam detection systems.

Does Google take manual action on webspa…

webspa…

Basic principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.

Don't deceive your users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining
what you've done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this
help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

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

Speci c guidelines

Avoid the following techniques:

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Automatically generated content (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/auto-gen-content)

Participating in link schemes (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/link-schemes)

Creating pages with little or no original content (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66361)

Cloaking (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking)

Sneaky redirects (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/sneaky-redirects)

Hidden text or links (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/hidden-text-links)

Doorway pages (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/doorway-pages)

Scraped content (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/scraped-content)

Participating in a liate programs without adding su cient value (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/a liate-programs)

Loading pages with irrelevant keywords (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/irrelevant-keywords)

Creating pages with malicious behavior (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/malicious-behavior), such as phishing or installing

viruses, trojans, or other badware

Abusing structured data (/search/docs/guides/sd-policies) markup

Sending automated queries (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66357) to Google

Follow good practices like these:

Monitoring your site for hacking (/search/docs/advanced/security/what-is-hacked) and removing hacked content as soon as it
appears

Preventing and removing user-generated spam (/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/user-gen-spam) on your site

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If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may take manual action
 (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175) against it. Once you have remedied the problem, you can submit your site
for reconsideration (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843).

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License
 (https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0). For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies (https://developers.google.com/site-policies).
Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its a liates.

Last updated 2021-01-12 UTC.

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