June 12th, 2007
Have You Read the Updated Google Webmaster Guidelines?
I am pretty surprised that many Webmasters nowadays do not even aware of the existence of the Google Webmaster Guidelines..In my opinion, every Webmasters should keep themselves up to date so as to adapt to the changes if need be. Just to illustrate an example, Google has been actively pinning down websites that only contains affiliate content without providing value for the users.
You can refer to the Google Webmaster Blog for more details on the updates they did to the Guidelines. Actually, Google did not do anything new this round but only states more details on what are some of the violations. I will briefly go through some of the more significant updates below.
Little or no original content
This is what many affiliate marketers are worrying now. Previously, most affiliate marketers only put up a page or two and grab in tons of inbound links to boost up their rankings in Google. Google has started to notice this trend and has already penalized sites with this nature. You can read more from Google perspective here.
Hidden text and links
This has been a black hat technique all along and is highly discouraged. Google has mentioned more details this time round here: Avoid hidden text and links. It also suggests how we can workaround with Flash-powered content.
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is a concerning issues to most Search Engine Optimizers currently. Google has advised several ways to overcome duplicated content. Google’s stand point is that they will not penalize sites with duplicate content but will only choose to display the most suitable pages for the search users. However, they still do not encourage the use of duplicate content for Search Engine Result Position (SERP) manipulation.
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