Google Updated Webmaster Guidelines: Know What Can Harm Your Rankings

Google have updated Webmaster guidelines and following them will help Google find, index and rank your website. It is specifically pointed that blocking JavaScript and CSS files may have a negative impact on your indexing and search rankings in Google. Google strongly stimulate people to pay very close attention to the updated Webmaster guidelines. The tech giant has updated its indexing system which will function more like a modern browser. It gave precise advice on allowing Googlebot to access the CSS, JavaScript and image files that a website uses. According to the giant, disallowing crawling of JavaScript or CSS files in your website's robots.txt have a negative impact on your search rankings. The technical Webmaster guidelines specifies that low quality guest blogging may be considered no or little original content by Google. The tech giant has restricted some guest blog networks in order to make their search results more accurate. Some webmasters attempts to attract more visitors to their site by creating pages with too many words but no authentic content. Google will penalize such domains that try to rank highly by displaying scraped pages that don't add required value to users. Design & Content Guidelines The design and content guidelines emphasize to make a website with a clear hierarchy and text links where every page should be accessible from at least one static text link. A website should include a site map and if it has a very large number of links, breaking it into multiple pages can be a good idea. Create a well-designed, useful and information-rich website that clearly and accurately describes your product. Try to use more text instead of images to describe important content, names, or links. This is because the Google crawler does not recognize text contained in images. Your title elements and ALT attributes should be accurate and descriptive. Technical Guidelines If you want your website to be on the top of search results, allow all of its assents, like CSS and JavaScript files, to be crawled. Your web server should support the If-Modified-Since HTTP header as it allows your server to tell Google if the content has changed since your site was last crawled. Supporting this features also saves you overhead and bandwidth. Using the robots.txt file on your web server tells crawlers which directories can be crawled and which cannot be. The advertisements on your site should not affect search engine rankings. The pages and links created by content management system should be easy to crawl. It is important to test your website to make sure that it appears accurately in different browsers. Monitor the performance of your site and optimize load times. Fast websites are more liked and visited by users and improve the quality of the web. The tech giant strongly recommends you to monitor site performance using different tools on a regular basis. The quality guidelines are all about deceptive and manipulative behavior. It specifies that make your site keeping users in mind, not the search engines. Do not trick search engine to improve the ranking if your site. The rule of thumb is make your website valuable, unique and more engaging. If your site stands out from others in the same field, half the work is done.