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Google Has Updated It’s Webmaster Guidelines – What You Need To Know

January 28, 2016

Today Google silently launched their new Webmaster Guidelines. This is one of the key rulebooks to follow when learning the SEO ABCs.

So what’s changed?

It seems as though Google have added a lot more content into its ‘General Guidelines’ sections. It has eliminated old headers and instead, revised the content of this section and broken it into expandable content areas (unusually, Google don’t recommend this practice!).

The new sections under ‘General’ are:

  1. Help Google find your pages
  2. Help Google understand your pages
  3. Help visitors use your pages

These guidelines are incredibly useful by forwarding you on to relevant resources, such as ‘Image Guidelines’, ‘robots.txt Tester’, ‘PageSpeed Insights’ and much more tools that will only increase your chances with Google.

What’s the same?

While the General Guidelines have received a big overhaul, the ‘Quality Guidelines’ have stayed the same. However, the advice alluding to these guidelines has been reworded.

Previously

“Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Even if you choose not to implement any of these suggestions, we strongly encourage you to pay very close attention to the “Quality Guidelines.”

Now Google has eliminated the phrase

“even if you chose not to implement any of these suggestions…”

This tells us these guides are more important to follow than ever before.

What should I do next?

Study it! Once you’re finished on this blog of course!

The more you know and the more up to date you are with the best SEO practices then the more benefits you will reap from your website. It’s as simple as that.

If you’re looking for more information, you can get in touch with us today. Fifteen offer SEO packages to suit your business and are official Google Partners.

Need help keeping up with Webmaster Guidelines?

Find out more about our Digital Marketing services

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