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 field.
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.
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans or other badware.
- Abusing rich snippets markup.
- Sending automated queries to Google.