For a website that sells, the three parts weigh very differently. Most sites clear the technical requirements without trying, and the best practices are advice. It’s the spam policies that cost businesses their rankings, and most of what they forbid is something a business was sold. Meeting all three makes a page eligible to appear; Google says plainly that it promises nothing more.
What Google requires: three technical checks
Google’s official SEO requirements are its three technical requirements, and a page has to meet all of them to be eligible for Google’s index:
- Googlebot isn’t blocked from the page.
- The page works: Google gets an HTTP 200 status code back.
- The page has indexable content, in a file type Google supports and within its spam policies.
On a store or a service site they fail in a few familiar ways: a noindex tag left over from the site’s build, a robots.txt rule that blocks a whole folder, a shop still behind its launch password, a page that answers with an error. Search Console shows each of them. Its URL Inspection tool says whether one page can be indexed and which address Google chose as the canonical one, and its Page indexing report lists the pages Google left out, with the reason for each.
One detail catches owners out. A robots.txt block stops Google crawling a page, but the page’s address can still appear in results. To keep a page out of Google, Google’s SEO documentation says to let Google crawl it and mark it noindex.
What Google punishes: the spam policies
Google’s SEO policy is its spam policies, which name the tactics that can get a page, or a whole site, ranked lower or left out of results: cloaking, doorway abuse, expired domain abuse, hacked content, hidden text and link abuse, keyword stuffing, link spam, machine-generated traffic, malicious practices, misleading functionality, scaled content abuse, scraping, sneaky redirects, thin affiliation, user-generated spam, and third-party pages published to borrow a host site’s standing, which its site reputation policy covers.
A store or a service business meets few of them, and usually because it paid for them:
| Policy | How a business breaks it |
|---|---|
| Link spam | A monthly package of links, products traded for reviews that link back, guest posts written around your keywords |
| Doorway abuse | A page for every town you serve, with the same text and the name swapped |
| Scaled content abuse | Articles generated by the hundred to catch searches, however they were written |
| Keyword stuffing | A block of text listing every town and region the page wants to rank for |
| Hacked content | Spam pages added to the site through a hole in its security, such as an outdated plugin |
Google catches most of this automatically. When one of its reviewers finds it, the site gets a manual action: Search Console’s Manual actions report shows whether yours has one and which pages it covers, and its Security issues report shows whether the site was hacked. Where each common tactic falls is set out in white hat vs black hat SEO.
What Google only suggests: the key best practices
The key best practices are advice, and Google’s list is short:
- Create helpful, reliable, people-first content.
- Use the words people search with, in prominent places: the title and main heading, alt text and link text.
- Make your links crawlable, so Google can find your other pages through them.
- Tell people about your site, in the communities where your customers are.
- Follow the specific best practices for images, video, structured data and JavaScript.
- Turn on the search features that make sense for your site.
- Use the right control for anything that shouldn’t appear in results.
Two of these do most of the work on a site that sells. Put the words your customers type into each page’s title and main heading, because a page that never says the search is rarely shown for it. And link every page that sells from the pages that argue for it: Google finds pages through links, and its documentation asks that every page you care about be linked from at least one other page on your site.
Structured data has its own rules, set out in Google Search Central’s general structured data guidelines, the official documentation for it. The markup must describe what the page visibly shows, stay up to date and not mislead. Breaking them can bring a manual action that takes away the rich result, such as the stars or the price beside your listing, though Google says that action doesn’t change how the page ranks.
What the guidelines leave out
The best practices point at what ranks an eligible page: the words searchers type, an answer that ends their search, links from sites people read. What the guidelines leave out is how Google checks the answer. It keeps a record of which results searchers click for each search, which is much of why rankings build over months, as how long SEO takes to work explains.
The search quality rater guidelines are a separate document: the handbook Google’s quality raters use to grade its results. It sets no rules for your site, but it describes what Google wants its results to be, and it’s where E-E-A-T comes from.
White hat SEO is work that stays inside all three parts and then does what they leave out. It’s how Rerank’s ethical SEO services are done: every change made on your own site, inside Google’s rules, and named in your monthly update.