Webmasters Guidelines is a valuable resource that Google offers indiscriminately to webmasters all across the globe. It deals with the suggestions and warnings that help developers and website administrators to create and manage websites effectively so that it is never penalised by Google search engine. There are such techniques that can attract moderate or severe penalty by Google. Web-spam content violation is a big issue that can prevent users from viewing the content of a website. This causes reduction in visibility and subsequently decline of business.
Syndicated content is the first thing to be discussed regarding SEO. This is such content that can be copied from other websites and pasted to another. There are websites that feature only relevant content and links. However, there are many such websites that include varieties of topics and content irrespective of their relevance. Such websites fail to impress users with their content as users do not get anything unique or relevance at these sites. Such websites may get penalised by Google for not providing any useful matter to their visitors and being on the World Wide Web only to attract arbitrary visitors.
Affiliate programmes are another issue in SEO. Websites that do not edit the content of their affiliates and provide the matter as provided by affiliates rank better. So, all the webmasters who have affiliate websites must offer original descriptions and reviews of products or services to true value to their visitors.
Doorway websites are another type of entities that webmasters should be careful about. Doorway websites exist only to provide link to other website. As a result of this, search results get clogged for certain phrases or keywords. These websites cause the search results to contain many results that link to the same source and thus make search for specific topics tough for users. Since it is the only purpose of these websites, they are of no value to users and therefore, they are considered harmful for SEO.
Such techniques and behaviour on the web violate Webmaster Guidelines. As a result of violation, websites may rank poorer on search results or, in severe cases, even get removed from it.
No webmaster should take risk for such consequences, which are bound decrease visibility and affect the business of the website. The best that webmasters can do is to try to provide good, interesting and relevant content to visitors while abiding by the guidelines.