SEO Google Guidelines

Google Search Guidelines (Ground Truth)

The canonical reference our other SEO skills cite. When a claim about "what works for Google" is contested, this skill is the arbiter: it distills what Google publicly states, separates confirmed facts from third-party speculation, and gives a method for testing any SEO claim instead of trusting folklore.

Primary-source rule. Only Google-owned domains count as ground truth: developers.google.com, web.dev, chrome.com, blog.google, support.google.com, status.search.google.com. Anything reported only by third-party trackers is a hypothesis, not a fact — label it as such and never encode it into an audit as if confirmed.

How Google Search Works

Three stages. A page must clear all three to rank:

1. Crawling — Googlebot discovers URLs via links and sitemaps. Blocked by robots.txt Disallow, network errors, or nofollow-only discovery.
2. Indexing — Google processes content, signals, and canonicals, then stores the page. Blocked by noindex, soft-404s, duplicate-canonical selection, or content Google can't render.
3. Serving — At query time, algorithms rank indexed pages by relevance, quality, and usability.

Mobile-first indexing is 100% complete (since 2024). Google crawls and indexes exclusively with the mobile Googlebot user-agent. If content/links/structured-data exist only in the desktop render, Google does not see them.

Search Essentials (the only hard requirements)

Formerly "Webmaster Guidelines." Three buckets:

Technical requirements — the floor to be eligible at all:

• Reachable by Googlebot (not blocked by robots.txt/noindex).
• Returns HTTP 200 for indexable content.
• Content in a processable format (HTML preferred; JS-rendered content is supported but slower and riskier — verify the rendered DOM, not just source).
• Served over HTTPS.

Spam policies — violating any of these risks demotion or a manual action: cloaking (different content to Googlebot vs users) · doorway pages · hidden text/links · keyword stuffing · link spam (buying/selling links, excessive exchanges) · scraped or scaled auto-generated content without added value · sneaky redirects · thin affiliate pages · site reputation abuse (third-party content riding a host's authority — "parasite SEO") · expired-domain abuse.

Key best practices (signals, not pass/fail rules): write for users not engines · clear crawlable hierarchy · unique descriptive <title> + meta description per page · logical H1–H6 structure · alt text + right-sized images · responsive mobile design · fast pages (Core Web Vitals) · submit an XML sitemap · use JSON-LD structured data for content Google should understand.

E-E-A-T and YMYL

E-E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor — it is the lens the Quality Rater Guidelines (QRG) use to describe what "high quality" means; the algorithm approximates it via many signals.

• YMYL ("Your Money or Your Life": health, finance, safety, legal, and — per the Sept 2025 QRG — major political/social topics) is held to the strictest quality bar; inaccurate YMYL content can cause real harm.
• Per the Dec 2025 core update, E-E-A-T-style assessment now applies to all competitive queries, not only YMYL. Treat trust signals as table stakes everywhere.

Practical: surface a real author entity and dates in the page graph.

// app/[locale]/blog/[slug]/page.tsx — author + dates as E-E-A-T signals
import type { Article, WithContext } from "schema-dts";

export default async function Post({ params }: { params: Promise<{ slug: string }> }) {
  const { slug } = await params;
  const post = await getPost(slug); // your Payload CMS query

  const jsonLd: WithContext<Article> = {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Article",
    headline: post.title,
    datePublished: post.publishedAt,    // ISO 8601 — keep accurate, do not fake freshness
    dateModified: post.updatedAt,
    author: {
      "@type": "Person",
      name: post.author.name,
      url: post.author.profileUrl,      // links the entity (Authoritativeness)
    },
  };

  return (
    <article>
      {/* visible byline + dates must match the schema — never mark up hidden content */}
      <p>By {post.author.name} · Updated {new Date(post.updatedAt).toLocaleDateString()}</p>
      <script type="application/ld+json"
        dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(jsonLd) }} />
    </article>
  );
}

Core Web Vitals (confirmed ranking signal since 2021)

Assessed at the 75th percentile of field data (real Chrome users via CrUX), not lab data.

• INP replaced FID (March 2024); FID was removed from all Chrome tooling (CrUX, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse) in September 2024. Never reference FID.
• Field data (CrUX) beats lab data (Lighthouse). A green Lighthouse score with red CrUX means real users are still suffering — believe the field.
• Target = all three at "Good." A single "Poor" fails the page in Search Console's CWV report.
• Sources of measurement: PageSpeed Insights (field + lab), CrUX (field), Lighthouse (lab only), Search Console CWV report (field). Use your own crawler/tooling to collect lab data at scale.

For the Next.js implementation playbook (RSC, next/image, font strategy, dynamic imports), defer to seo-technical / seo-performance. This skill owns only the thresholds and the field-vs-lab rule.

Structured Data: eligibility, not decoration

• JSON-LD is Google's preferred format (over Microdata/RDFa). Place in <script type="application/ld+json">.
• Always include @context and @type. Required properties gate rich-result eligibility; recommended ones improve quality.
• Only mark up content visible on the page. Marking up hidden/misleading content is a spam-policy violation and can trigger a manual action.
• Keep schema in sync with content; validate with a rich-results validator before deploy.

Retired / restricted types — do not promise rich results for these:

When in doubt about a type's current support, check developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data rather than assuming. Deep schema patterns live in seo-schema.

Algorithm-update awareness

Two failure modes when rankings drop, and they have different remedies:

Manual actions (you get a notification)

Reported in Search Console → Manual actions. Fix the root cause, then submit a reconsideration request. Common triggers and fixes:

Algorithmic demotions (no notification — you infer it from a timeline)

Detected by correlating a traffic drop with a confirmed rollout window. No reconsideration exists; you fix quality and wait for the next core update to reassess.

• Helpful Content System was merged into core ranking in March 2024 — it is no longer a standalone update. Helpfulness is now judged inside every core update. Low-value, unhelpful, or scaled AI content still gets demoted, just via core.
• Core updates = broad quality reassessment across all signals.
• Spam updates = automated detection of spam patterns.
• Link spam updates = devaluation of manipulative links.

Reacting to a suspected update hit — protocol

1. Confirm a rollout actually happened. Check status.search.google.com and the Search Central blog for an official window. No confirmed update = look for a technical or seasonal cause first.
2. Align the timeline. Overlay your Search Console / analytics drop on the rollout dates. A drop outside the window is probably not the update.
3. Segment the damage. Which URL groups, query clusters, or page types lost? A site-wide drop vs a section-specific drop point to different causes (quality-wide vs parasite/section).
4. Classify the cause against the buckets above (manual vs algorithmic; quality vs links vs spam).
5. Fix the root cause, not the symptom. Improving the specific weak pages beats sitewide cosmetic edits.
6. Set expectations. Algorithmic recovery is gated on the next core update — often weeks to months. Do not promise a date.

Maintaining update awareness: keep a small, dated, source-cited log of confirmed updates (date, name, kind ∈ core / spam / policy / QRG / schema / CWV / product, Google-owned source URL, one-line impact). Promote a third-party-reported update into your confirmed log only after a Google-owned source verifies it. Recent confirmed rollouts illustrate the cadence: roughly three core updates per year (e.g., core updates landed in Mar, Jun, Dec 2025 and Mar, May 2026), interleaved with spam updates and periodic QRG revisions.

Falsifiability methodology (claude-seo's core value)

SEO is saturated with untestable folklore. Before acting on any claim — yours, a client's, or a blog's — run it through this filter.

1. Source tier. Is the claim backed by a Google-owned URL (fact), an experiment with data (evidence), or an assertion (folklore)? Downgrade folklore to "hypothesis."

2. State the falsifier. A claim you can't disprove is worthless. For every recommendation, answer:

"How would we know this failed?" Name the concrete observation that would prove the claim wrong.

3. Define the leading indicator. Rankings are a lagging, noisy signal. Pick something that moves first so you learn before months pass.

4. Prefer the smallest reversible test. Change one variable on a representative URL set, define the metric and the window before shipping, then measure. If you can't define the metric, you can't claim success.

5. Attribute honestly. Correlation with a rollout is not proof of causation. State confidence ("consistent with", not "caused by") unless a Google-owned source or a controlled test backs it.

When other skills should cite this one

• seo-audit / seo-technical / seo-performance → CWV thresholds, field-vs-lab rule, mobile-first fact.
• seo-schema → structured-data eligibility and retired types.
• seo-content / ai-seo / seo-geo → E-E-A-T/YMYL framing, helpful-content-is-now-core, AI-content spam stance.
• Any "we got hit by an update" investigation → the reacting-to-an-update protocol and falsifiability filter.

Verification links (Google-owned only)

• Search Essentials — developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials
• How Search works — developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/how-search-works
• Spam policies — developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
• Creating helpful content (E-E-A-T) — developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
• Structured data overview — developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data
• Ranking update history — developers.google.com/search/updates/ranking-update-history
• Search status dashboard (live incidents) — status.search.google.com
• Search Central blog — developers.google.com/search/blog
• Manual actions report help — support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9044175
• Core Web Vitals (web.dev) — web.dev/articles/vitals

Parts adapted from claude-seo (MIT, © 2026 agricidaniel).