Search Essentials, formerly the Webmaster Guidelines, sets out the technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices for appearing in Google Search. It is the first document to read before anything more advanced.
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Its three parts
- Technical requirements: what Google needs to crawl, index and serve a page
- Spam policies: behaviours that can lead to demotion or removal
- Key best practices: guidance on making content people want
How to use it
Check your site against it as a baseline, and revisit it when Google announces changes. Anything that conflicts with it is a risk worth fixing.
Common mistakes
Reading third-party summaries only
Go to the source, since interpretations drift and go out of date.
Frequently Asked Questions
It makes you eligible and avoids penalties. Ranking well depends on the quality and relevance of your pages.
Keep reading
- Google spam policies: Google's spam policies list the practices, such as cloaking and link schemes, that can get content demoted or removed from Search.
- Structured Data Guidelines: Google's structured data guidelines set the quality and content rules markup must follow to be eligible for rich results, beyond technical validity.
- Helpful Content: Helpful content is Google's term for people-first content made to serve readers, not to rank. The idea now lives inside Google's core ranking systems.
- Manual Action: A manual action is a penalty applied by a human reviewer at Google when a site breaks its spam policies. It appears in Search Console.
- Bing: Bing is Microsoft's search engine. Its index also powers other products, so Bing visibility can matter beyond Bing's own results page.
- Bingbot: Bingbot is the main web crawler for Microsoft's Bing search engine. It fetches pages for Bing's index and identifies itself with a bingbot/2.0 token in its user agent.
- Brand SERP: A brand SERP is the results page people see when they search your company or product name. For a SaaS company it is often the last page a buyer checks before booking a demo.
- Brave Search: Brave Search is a privacy-focused search engine from the maker of the Brave browser that runs its own independent web index.
