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Does Your Website Comply With Google's Guidelines?
In many SEO circles, complying with Google's Webmaster Guidelines has become somewhat of a religion. Those who adhere to the guidelines are "accepted in the beloved". The rebels who do not comply become castaways, given such labels as "blackhats" and "webspammers". Where does your website stack up in all of this? Could you be using "blackhat SEO" techniques without even realizing it?
In an article dated 4-26-06, Matt Cutts of Google informs webmasters that Google has begun to send emails to some webmasters that have violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines in their websites. Matt outlines many of the violations that may result in a website being penalized by the search engine giant, and which type of violations Google will be courteous enough to inform the webmaster about. Some of these violations are very obvious, while others are more subtle and unassuming. Before we look at some of them, let's look at the type of website that Google desires to include in their search engine index. The following quote is from the Google Webmaster Guidelines webpage:
Make pages for users, not for search engines."
This one sentence says volumes. However, if you are like most webmasters, a ranking on Google is a very high priority. Without a top search engine listing, many websites will never even get viewed by a user. To many webmasters, this sentence seems like a catch-22. But, there is a balance that can be attained. As a matter of fact, if you focus on creating valuable website content for your users and visitors, you will meet Google's expectations and your own goals simultaneously.
Let’s take a look at a few of the most common violations and see what Matt Cutts has to say about them in his article:
Invisible Text
“I recently saw a small pub in England that had hidden text on its page. That could result in the site being removed from Google, because our users get angry when they click on a search result and discover hidden text ? even if the hidden text wasn’t what caused the site to be returned in Google’s results. In this case it was a particular shame, because the hidden text was the menu that the pub offered. That’s exactly the sort of text that a user would like to see on the web site; making the text visible would have made the site more useful.” (Matt Cutts of Google, 4-26-06)
Let’s face it, any invisible text on your website is not meant to help your users or visitors find anything on your site, because they cannot even see it. Invisible text can only be construed as a way to trick a search engine into getting a higher ranking. This is a big no-no, and may result in a penalization by Google and other major search engines because it violates the #2 rule in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines: “Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.”
Hidden Text
“This is a small hotel. They offer 18 bedrooms in Bath, England, for you to rest and relax. It’s a real site for a legitimate business. But notice the hidden text at the bottom of the page where I’ve highlighted in red. This is a perfect example of a site that should be able to find out that their page conflicts with our quality guidelines. Google wants this hotel to know about potential violations of Google’s webmaster quality guidelines on its site.” (Matt Cutts of Google, 4-26-06)
This is a good example of a borderline violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, albeit still a violation. This text is too small for a user to see, therefore it is referred to as “hidden text”. If you are lucky, Google will email you before penalizing your website for such an offense… but not everyone is so lucky.
Webspam
Here’s what Matt Cutts had to say about webspam in his article:
“From this picture alone, you can see that the site is doing:
- keyword-stuffing
- deliberately including misspellings
- nonsense or gibberish text, probably auto-generated by a program
- you might be able to guess from the left-hand side and all the variants of “tax deferred” that there are many other pages like this. You’d be right: the site has thousands of doorway pages.
What you can’t tell from the snapshot is that:
- the site owner attempted to gather links by programmatically spamming other sites. Specifically, the site owner found a vulnerable software package on the web that doesn’t yet support the nofollow attribute for untrusted links, and then spammed several good sites trying to get links.
- this site is also cloaking. Search engines get the static page loaded with keywords that you see. Users get a completely different page.
- the pages returned to users employ sneaky redirects. Users get a small page with a JavaScript redirect and also a meta refresh; each page just does a redirect to the root page of this domain.
- Given all this, would it surprise you to find out that when a user finally arrives at the root page, every single link that they are offered is a link that the spammer makes money from?
Needless to say, I’d rather not tip off spammers like this when we find their pages.
I hope these two examples give you some idea of the sites that we’d like to alert (and not alert) to issues with their site. Just to repeat: not every site with a penalty will receive confirmation and the offer of a reinclusion request. But if this program works well, we’ll certainly look for ways to keep improving communication with legitimate site owners while not tipping off spammer sites.” (Matt Cutts of Google, 4-26-06)
This article by Matt Cutts, who is well-known in the SEO industry as the "Google expert" on SEO issues, is one of the most comprehensive documents ever written on what Google likes and dislikes in a website. I would encourage anyone who desires to rank high on Google to use this article as a guide on how to optimize your website.
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