SEO Starter Guide (Google Search Central)
Google’s own introductory SEO guide, covering on-page practices it credits toward crawling, indexing, and ranking, plus a set of explicit myth-corrections about factors it says don’t matter.
License: CC BY 4.0 — confirmed via the page’s own footer notice; code samples are Apache 2.0.
Key points
- Add a
nofollow(or similar) annotation to links pointing at untrusted external sites, and have a CMS automatically add the same annotation to any link posted by users, to avoid the site being associated with whatever it links to. - Grouping topically similar pages into shared directories helps Google learn how often that section of the site tends to change, which shapes how often it gets recrawled.
- A video should live on its own page with a descriptive title and description, placed near the text that discusses it — the same contextual-placement principle the guide gives for images.
- States plainly that heading order/nesting has no effect on Google Search ranking (“it doesn’t matter if you’re using them out of order”) even though it remains valuable for screen readers, and that there’s no ideal heading count per page.
- Other stated non-factors: the
keywordsmeta tag, hitting a specific word count, and a domain’s TLD or its use of a subdomain vs. a subdirectory.