SEO
Google Search Essentials
Google's umbrella ranking-and-eligibility guide — replaced the old `Webmaster Guidelines` in 2022. Three pillars: technical requirements, spam policies, and the helpful-content / E-E-A-T quality bar.
What it is
Google Search Essentials — Google's foundational guide for being eligible to appear in Search. Three sections: technical requirements (crawlable, indexable, Search-eligible URLs), spam policies (cloaking, doorway pages, link schemes, scaled content abuse), and key best practices including E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) and the helpful-content guidance.
Why it matters
This is the rule book. Violating spam policies is the fastest way to lose all organic traffic; failing technical requirements means you never had any. The E-E-A-T language is the closest Google publishes to actual ranking criteria for content quality — used heavily in YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) verticals like health, finance, and legal.
Who it applies to
Every site that wants Google traffic.
How WQI scores it
Web Quality Index considers this standard satisfied when all of the 3 supporting factors pass.
| # | Factor | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | Title, meta description, OG, Twitter cards, canonical | live |
| 13 | H1 tag presence | live |
| 14 | Sitemap.xml + robots.txt presence | live |
Related standards
- See also
- robots/sitemap , Schema.org , Viewport , Canonical
Standards that share factors with this one
Auto-computed from overlapping factor tickets in satisfiedBy, excluding standards already listed under "See also" above. Strong overlap suggests these standards rise and fall together when sites are scored.