Google Webmaster Guidelines

Below are the basic guidelines Google follows to find, index, and rank for your site. I tried my best to simplify and list all the important suggestions as per Google’s recommendations,

• All pages on the site should be reached by a link from any other another findable page.
• Provide a sitemap file with links that point to the important pages on your site.
• Limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number, As per Google’s Guidelines, a few thousand at most should be ok.
• Make sure that your web server correctly supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header.
• Use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget (Learn how to manage crawling with the robots.txt file)
• Follow steps to make your Site Google friendly (Refer Link for more details)
• Contents / Pages should be published primarily for users, not for search engines.
• Google strictly follows the principle of “Not to deceive your users.”
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings
• Pages should be designed and developed as per User needs not as per search engine needs.

Avoid (As per Google’s directions) 

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content
• Cloaking
• Sneaky redirects
• Hidden text or links
• Doorway pages
• Scraped content
• Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
• Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
• Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other Malware/badware.
• Abusing rich snippets markup
• Sending automated queries to Google

Best Practices –

• Strictly adhere to Quality Guidelines.
• Monitoring and fixing your site from hacking and malicious activities.
• Preventing and removing user-generated spam on your site.
• Recommendations are to secure your site with HTTPS.

Recommended Testings –

• Optimize your page loading times.
• The site should support all device types and sizes, including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
• Verify and test all major Browser compatibility (Browser compatibility)
• If Google finds if your site violates any of the above guidelines, then Google will take manual actions against it.

 Further Readings –

• Manual Actions report.
• Security errors explained.
• WebMasters

Below are the tests recommended by Google and some sample snapshots of test results. 

• Pagespeed
• Mobile Friendly Test
• Webpagetest

• Please refer to below video from Google which explains Webspam Content Violations in more detail.