Taking the leap and gonna start a blog? Or ready to start monetising your blog? Well, there is a lot to learn. This is the first instalment of my ultimate guide on how to safely monetise your blog.
You’ll find it so much easier to success if you can stick to the best practices of the internet.
In this post, we will be going through the most important rules and best practices you need to know from Googles Webmaster Guidelines.
If you are looking for SEO advice, this is not the post for you. I do have loads of posts offering my best SEO advice. In this post, we are not going to be looking at SEO in its normal form.
In this guide we will be looking at:
- Manual actions
- Simple rules.
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content
- Cloaking
- Hidden text or links
- Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
By breaking Google’s Webmaster guidelines you could end up with your blog having a manual action against you from Google.
What is a manual action from Google?
“Google issues a manual action against a site when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with Google’s webmaster quality guidelines. Most manual actions address attempts to manipulate our search index. Most issues reported here will result in pages or sites being ranked lower or omitted from search results without any visual indication to the user.” – Google
How do I know if I have a manual action against me?
If your site is affected by a manual action, Google will notify you in the Manual Actions report and in the Search Console message centre.
Simple rules to ranking on Google
- Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
- Google is a big advocate for creating quality content for your users. It’s crawler is smart enough to know when content has been written for search engines.
- Google works hard to ensure there is quality in search. If your content doesn’t actually fit the search intent for the keywords you are targeting it likely will not rank.
- Don’t deceive your users.
- Don’t try to scam your users in any way. Don’t try to install viruses on their computers etc…
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.
- A useful test is to ask yourself: “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Participating in link schemes
This is something that I see bloggers make mistakes with every single day and is really hard to get right. With link schemes, there is a history of abuse and misinformation around which has been going on since search engines first came to fruition.
What are link schemes?
Link schemes are intended to manipulate Domain Authority or a site’s ranking in Google search. They are a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
What are some examples of link schemes?
- Buying or selling links that pass Domain Authority. This includes:
- Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain do-follow links
- Exchanging goods or services for do-follow links
- Sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing it and including a do-follow link
- Excessive link exchanges (“Link to me and I’ll link to you”) or partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking.
As long as you don’t pass on Domain Authority to the buyer of the ad, your advertising links won’t violate Google’s guidelines.
How to not pass on Domain Authority?
There are a few different ways that you can create sponsored content and link to the brand without passing on Domain Authority.
- rel=”sponsored” – For paid or sponsored links. This would assumingly include affiliate links, although Google hasn’t explicitly said.
- rel=”ugc” – Links within all user-generated content. Google has stated if UGC is created by a trusted contributor, this may not be necessary.
- rel=”nofollow” – A catchall for all nofollow links. As with the other nofollow directives, these links generally won’t be used for ranking, crawling, or indexing purposes.
If you see a site that is participating in link schemes intended to manipulate rankings, you can report them to Google.
Creating pages with thin or little to no content
As Google are advocates for creating quality content that provides value to your readers, they have made creating pages with this or little to no content against their guidelines.
What are some examples of thin content?
- Thin affiliate pages
- Content from other sources i.e. scraped content or low-quality sponsored blog posts
- These are often found elsewhere on the web too so they’re likely causing you to have duplicate content issues. As well as potential link scheme issues.
Top tip from me!
For every article I write, I make sure it is longer than 300 words.
Cloaking
Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.
Some examples of cloaking include:
- Serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images to users
- Hiding sponsored content to manipulate the content users see. I.e. creating paid content that is not relevant to your site so cloaking it from your site but leaving it to be accessible via search engines.
- If you don’t believe in something you are posting, don’t post it.
Hidden text or links
Hiding text or links in your content to manipulate Google’s search rankings can be seen as deceptive and is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
What counts as hidden text and links
- Using white text on a white background
- Locating text behind an image
- Using CSS to position text off-screen
- Setting the font size to 0
- Hiding a link by only linking one small character—for example, the full stop at the end of a sentence
When looking at your content to see if you have any hidden text or links, look for anything that’s not easily viewable by your readers. Are any text or links there solely for search engines rather than visitors?
Not all hidden text is bad though
Do you use any assets that search engines have difficulty accessing, like JavaScript or images? Using descriptive text for these items can improve the accessibility of your site.
Remember that some of your readers might be using screen readers, so they will not be able to view that content and will benefit from the descriptive text as well.
Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value
Webmaster Guidelines advise you to create websites with original content that adds value for users. This is particularly important for sites that participate in affiliate programs.
Affiliate programmes are a great way for bloggers to monetize their content. There are loads of great programmes that bloggers can sign up to.
Blogs that feature a lot of content from affiliate networks can suffer in Google’s search rankings, because they do not have enough added value content that differentiates them from other sites on the web.
Added value means additional meaningful content or features, such as additional information about price, purchasing location, or product category.
Exampe of thin affiliates:
- Pages with product affiliate links on which the product descriptions and reviews are copied directly from the original merchant without any original content or added value.
Good affiliates add value, for example by offering original product reviews or fitting them nicely in a blog post.
How can you make the most of your affiliate links
- Affiliate program content should form only a minor part of the content of your site if the content adds no additional features.
- Ask yourself why a user would want to visit your site first rather than visiting the original merchant directly. Make sure your site adds substantial value beyond simply republishing content available from the original merchant.
- When selecting an affiliate program, choose a product category appropriate for your intended audience. The more targeted the affiliate program is to your site’s content, the more value it will add and the more likely you will be to rank better in Google search results and make money from the program.
- For example, a well-maintained food blog should have an affiliate partnership with a supplier who kitchen utensils rather than skis.
- Don’t over do it, your readers keep coming back to read what you write. Not to buy things.
Now what?
So you’ve read through Googles Webmaster Guidelines? These are only a few of them, which I think apply the most to bloggers.
Below are links to all of the other aspects of the Webmaster Guidelines:
- Automatically generated content
- Sneaky redirects
- Doorway pages
- Scraped content
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses
- Abusing structured data markup
If your site breaches any of these you could be at risk of facing a manual action.
If something you are doing feels wrong, it probably is. So don’t risk it!
This post is a part of a series in the coming weeks, I will be summarising the advertising standards for bloggers as well as the additional tasks you have to do to legally monetize your blog.
In the meantime give me a shout if you have any questions!