Google publishes the behaviours it considers spam, including cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, link spam, scaled content abuse and site reputation abuse. Violations can be handled automatically or by a manual action.
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Comppound runs SEO and AI search for SaaS companies. We plan what to publish, produce it with AI, and every page passes automated checks, and a person reviews samples and anything high-risk.
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Why they matter
They define the line between optimising and manipulating. Many risky tactics sold as shortcuts, such as bulk AI pages or paid link packages, sit squarely inside them.
Staying inside them
Review new tactics against the policies before running them. If a technique only works while search engines cannot see it clearly, treat it as a warning sign.
Common mistakes
Assuming small scale is safe
Policies apply regardless of how much you do. Scale only makes patterns easier to detect.
Frequently Asked Questions
Manual actions appear in Search Console. Algorithmic demotions show as traffic drops without a notice.
Keep reading
- Google Search Essentials: Google Search Essentials is Google's baseline guidance on what a site needs to be eligible and perform well in Search.
- Scaled Content Abuse: Scaled content abuse is producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help users, whether by AI, people or templates.
- Site Reputation Abuse: Site reputation abuse is publishing third-party content on a trusted site mainly to exploit that site's ranking signals. It breaks Google's spam policies.
- Cloaking: Cloaking is showing search engines different content from what users see, to manipulate rankings and mislead people. Google treats it as spam.
- Algorithmic Penalty: An algorithmic penalty is a ranking loss caused by Google's automated systems, with no notice in Search Console and no reconsideration request.
- Baidu: Baidu is the leading search engine in mainland China. Ranking there requires Simplified Chinese content and usually local hosting and licensing.
- BERT: BERT is a language model Google applied to Search in 2019 to understand how word order and small words change the meaning of a query.
- Dwell Time: Dwell time is how long a searcher stays on a page after clicking a result before returning to the results. Pogo-sticking is bouncing straight back and clicking another result.
