Every site owner need to be aware of the webmaster guidelines that all major search engines publish. These are the rules can determine whether or not your site will rank well.
Webmaster guidelines are more than just guidelines. They are the rules that all site owners are expected to be in compliance with if they wish to see their site have a fair chance for ranking well in search results pages. It is also the way that search engines justify weeding out the sites that do not follow their rules.
Although each set of guidelines is different, they rarely conflict with each other, which means that it is a good idea to look at all of the guidelines as a whole and avoid the practices that they warn about, while building the characteristics into a site that search engines consider to be desirable.
Here are the links to the webmaster guidelines pages for all the major search engines.
Guidelines for Successful Indexing
Yahoo! Search Content Quality Guidelines
Many sites are not in full compliance with these rules. Sometimes web site designers are not aware of the guidelines, while others use techniques that were considered acceptable at one time, but today are considered to be spam. Violations of the rules can get a site banned, penalized or filtered out of organic search results.
Banning is the complete removal from a search engine’s index. Penalties and filters typically result in reduced rankings. Most often, a reduced ranking will banish a site to rank positions well below the top 30 search results, where very few users will ever find the site.
If you are not sure if your site is in full compliance with search engine guidelines, a full evaluation or partial inspection of the site by an SEO professional can make this determination. Our web site evaluations include detailed instructions for correcting all of the issues that we uncover.
