Just read Google's Guidelines

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, welcome to episode 94 of SEO's Not that Hard. Today, I'm going to be talking about why you should be reading Google's guidelines. This is for anybody, no matter how well qualified you think you are or are not in SEO, whatever your experience level. This is really like basic, back to basic stuff, and the reason why I'm saying I think this needs reiterating is because I see so many people of so many different skill levels saying things that either contradict with or just seem like they haven't read these, and if you're a beginner, it's really the best place to start now. This isn't a going to be a rant about how everybody should just do what google asks, because that's not what this is about. This is about understanding what playing field is that google ideally want because Because, like it or loathe it, google send nearly 70% of all outbound clicks to the web. So you can decide you don't want to play with Google traffic, then that's fine, but you're cutting yourself off from more than two thirds of the potential traffic to your website. I don't think anybody really wants to do that.

At the end of the day, we all want to be in Google, but it's Google's sun pit. It's their rules that we all have to work with, regardless of which side of those rules we work. You may decide to be black hat and you're going to work against those rules. You may decide to be white hat and purely only work within them, or you may decide you're going to push the boundaries a little bit and see where you. All approaches are fine as far as I'm concerned, but what's important for everybody everybody is that we understand where the line is that Google has drawn for every piece of their index, every piece of their rules, all their guidelines. You need to know them. It's not enough just to read them and know them once. It's a key thing you've got to keep your eye on because they change all the time. They've recently made a new version. It used to be called Webmaster Guidelines. It's now called Google Search Essentials. I'll put links to them in the show notes or you can just Google Google Guidelines or Google Search Essentials. Now they change these regularly, so regardless of where you're deciding to play, you need to keep in touch with where they are at any one time.

They've actually simplified them quite a lot in the last round. Why, I don't know. I suspect partly is because I think Google has improved technically over the years on how it can crawl and understand content. For example, years ago they couldn't understand anything that was in javascript. Now javascript they render it, they can find stuff, they can find javascript links. There's all sorts of things they didn't used to be able to do that they can do now. And that's probably to the point where there's less and less technical rules probably now than there were many years ago in terms of how they can find and understand stuff on a page. So that's probably why they're asking people, or simplifying what they're asking people to do.

In some cases they split their essentials into technical requirements. That's the kind of things Google needs from a web page to show in Google Search. Then it has their spam policies, which is the ones that there's been an awful lot with recently. Obviously, we're recording now, at the time the march um core update is still rolling out and there's a lot in there around those spam policies, those new spam policies they've put in. They're they're really key to know um and understand because they're the things that are most likely to cause you penalty issues. And then they have their key best practices, which is some other things on how you can help improve how your site appears in in google search results. So there's three elements, so they're kind of the key ones here. You want the technical elements, technical requirements to know what you need to do to make sure that your content can be indexed. The spam policies to make sure that you stay on whichever side of their spam rules that you want to stay on. And then some key best practices for how you can improve how your site appears in the Google search results. So these are the basic ones to get through and there's not a huge.

You can read through this stuff in less than an hour probably on the Google search essentials, but do keep up to date with it. But do keep up to date with it, do watch out for changes and follow I would say, suggesting following people on Google's search liaison team, who will generally tweet and make announcements when these documents and these things are revised and updated. The other thing, then, I would suggest that people really read and take heart of is the Google Rater Guidelines. Now, I did a whole series of podcasts about the google quality rater guidelines about four or five months ago, and that is a bigger document to read. It does go into a bit more depth with certain more examples of the kind of things google's looking for.

Now that those guidelines, if you're not familiar with them, they're the ones that are used by the Google quality raters that Google employs all around the world, who they use to train their machine learning models. So these are people that will be given lists of websites to go to and they'll be asked to rate the quality of those websites on a whole range of features. And this is where, in many respects, google's trying to get a human to qualify the eeat the experience, expertise, authority and trust of any website, and they use these ratings to train a machine learning model that can then evaluate other sites against that data set. Now there's huge amounts of detail in that. It is a little longer than an hour read.

But once you've understood the basic Google search essentials and you're now looking to take your thinking about how websites should be designed and the kind of features you do and don't want to be putting in, and the kind of some of the things you want to avoid, because there's lots of the things that Google doesn't like in those Google Quality Rater Guidelines that are very well worth reading about because it can give you clues towards the kind of things that you should and should not be creating. So, yeah, that's the next step. Now, once you've read these documents, suggested them, have an understanding of what Google's baselines are, then it means you can then any other SEO advice you hear from anybody else, from whatever side of the SEO world, and fence they sit on, you can at least then compare it back to what you know Google wants and then you can make a decision. On any tactic that you follow, any strategy you follow, you can base it against those guidelines and then you at least can evaluate any risk or lack of risk or whatever the risk is in your tolerance of risk against those guidelines and against the advice and strategies that people are suggesting to you or you're coming across online from other people. Because, as I've mentioned in another podcast just a few days ago, I mean I'm really frustrated about how some people are pushing tactics without telling people explicitly what the risks are and where it stands against Google's guidelines. And again, I don't mind what people do, what tactics they do and what side of this fence they choose to sit on, but I think if they're educating other people, they really need to be clear about any risks there are and how any tactical strategy stacks up against what google actually wants, so people can choose what to do. If people want to choose black hat, gray hat, white hat, whatever, whatever makes comfortable, based on their risk tolerance and what they want to achieve and in what timelines, and then it's all fair and that's all fair enough.

So, yeah, that's, uh, that's today, so I will put links to both those documents and, um, yeah, I would suggest go read them and, um, see what you think before I go. I just want to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools, that keywords people use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeoplesusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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