What’s New in Google Search Essentials?
Search Essentials
Google is officially rebranding the Webmaster Guidelines as “Search Essentials,” which comes with a simplified refresh consisting of only three sections.
In addition to making the former Google Webmaster Guidelines easier to understand, Google’s motivation behind the refresh is to move away from the term “webmaster.”
Google has gradually removed “webmaster” from its branding over the past few years. For example, “Google Webmaster Central” was rebranded as “Google Search Central.”
“Webmaster” is a dated term, Google says, and doesn’t include all content creators who want to see their content rank in search results.
Many former guidelines are moving to specific sections within the Google Search Central website.
Google Search Essentials now consists of three categories of points covered in the former Webmaster Guidelines.
The three categories covered in Google Search Essentials include:
- Technical requirements
- Key best practices
- Spam policies
What changed?
While Google has made many updates over the years to the old Google Webmaster Guidelines, Google decided it was time for a major refresh. Here is an overview of what has changed.
Name change
From Google Webmaster Guidelines to Google Search Essentials, because, well, Google doesn’t think webmaster is a term used much these days and/or it is too narrowly focused. This is similar to Google dropped the named Webmaster Tools for Search Console in 2015.
Technical requirements
The technical requirements cover the bare minimum that Google Search needs from a web page in order to show it in search results. There are actually very few technical things you need to do to a web page; most sites pass the technical requirements without even realizing it.
Spam policies
The spam policies detail the behaviors and tactics that can lead to a page or an entire site being ranked lower or completely omitted from Google Search. Sites that focus on providing the best content and experience for people and uphold the spirit of our principles are more likely to do well in Google Search results.
Key best practices
While there are many things you can do to improve your site’s SEO, there are a few core practices that can have the most impact on your web content’s ranking and appearance on Google Search:
- Create helpful, reliable, people-first content.
- Use words that people would use to look for your content, and place those words in prominent locations on the page, such as the title and main heading of a page, and other descriptive locations such as alt text and link text.
- Make your links crawlable so that Google can find other pages on your site via the links on your page.
- Tell people about your site. Be active in communities where you can tell like-minded people about your services and products that you mention on your site.
- If you have other content, such as images, videos, structured data, and JavaScript, make sure you’re following those specific best practices so that we can understand those parts of your page too.
- Enhance how your site appears on Google Search by enabling features that make sense for your site.
- If you have content that shouldn’t be found in search results or you want to opt out entirely, use the appropriate method for controlling how your content appears in digital Google Search.
Why You Should Care?
The Webmaster Guidelines has been the go-to resource for SEO best practices in Google Search for the past two decades. Changing the name and updating this resource is a big deal for many SEOs.
SEOs, webmasters (we should not use that word), site owners, publishers, as well as anyone who owns or manages a website should review the new Google Search Essentials.
Tips to turn Google’s Search Essentials into strategy
Stay up to date with Google’s spam policies
It is important for SEOs to be aware of these policies. If you suspect your client is using techniques like cloaking, keyword stuffing or republishing large amounts of scraped content, thus you need to be able to advise your client of the risks.
Pay attention to Google’s advice on how to create helpful and reliable content that serves people first
In fact. Google tells us that their ranking systems designed to “present helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people, not gain search engine rankings.”
The Google Search Essentials document aggregates much of the advice that previously given in Google’s documentation on what site owners should know about core updates, product review updates, helpful marketing content update, and more.
If you want to know how to create the type of content Google is trying to rank, you absolutely need to be paying attention to the information in this document.
Don’t sleep on the quality rater guidelines
Google’s final piece of advice in this document is to “get to know E-A-T and the quality rater guidelines” (QRG).
they give us many clues that can help us understand what kind of marketing content Google wants to rank well when they write their algorithms.
Google ends their documentation on creating helpful content by telling us that doing so can help us rank better:
“Reading the guidelines may help you self-assess how your content is doing from an E-A-T perspective, improvements to consider, and help align it conceptually with the different signals that our automated systems use to rank content.”
There are technical improvements that can help sites. But if you want to get ahead of your client’s competitors, the answer is going to be determining where and how to make digital content more helpful.
Thus, this could mean making E-A-T-related improvements or it may mean making substantial changes to how content written and presented to searchers.