Google breaks its own rules.
We all know when it comes to the world of Google and getting to the top of search listings, Google is very strict on its policy to promote good quality relevant websites rather than results that have been the result of a black hat campaigns.
Google provides suggestions for your website to avoid your content being flagged as spam or penalised for over marketing by being removed from Google search. While the guidelines are not a complete bible of what to do and what not to do they hint towards best practices:
Quality guidelines
• Don’t hide text and links
• Don’t show one content to search engines and the other to users (cloaking)
• Don’t get involved in link schemes
• Avoid marketing tricks that don’t benefit users.
• Don’t use computer programmes to submit pages and check rankings
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords
• Don’t duplicate content across multiple pages and domains
• Don’t create pages with malicious content such as viruses and badware
• Avoid doorway pages, sites with little or no content that’s sole purpose is to link to your site.
Design and content guidelines.
• Sites should be designed with a clear hierarchy
• You should produce a sitemap to help users html sitemap and search engines (xml sitemap) navigate your site
• You should keep links on a page to a reasonable amount
• Link text rather than images and use text for content and important names, if you must use images use the alt attribute to detail what is there.
• Show the layout of your page and make sure title and alt tags are accurate and descriptive
• Check the site for broken links and make sure you use correct html
• If your page is dynamic be aware that Google may not crawl every dynamic page
Technical guidelines
• Use a text browser such as Lynx to see the text version of your site, this is how search engines see your site and you’ll be able to see if you are using to many images.
• Use robots txt to allow search bots to crawl your site and restrict access to areas you don’t want crawling.
• Optimise your sites performance and speed, fast sites improve user satisfaction and the overall quality of the web.
So how has Google broken its own rules, well it was actually a bit of an accident; Google paid a marketing company to produce some video adverts for them. The company paid bloggers to write articles singing the praises of Google chrome. These paid posts contained links to Google chrome and passed across page rank, causing Google chrome to appear at the top of search results. Google have apologised as it was unaware of the marketing campaign and the marketing company itself admits fault. All in all this is an embarrassing incident for Google who prides itself on keeping on the straight and narrow. The moral of the story is always use a reputable online marketing company like Eventure Internet that keeps to the right side of Google guidelines.
