Google groups its expectations into three tiers, and they are not equally negotiable. Technical requirements are the small set of things a page must do to be eligible at all. Spam policies describe behaviour that can get a site demoted or removed. Key best practices are the things that make a page useful once it is eligible.
The technical requirements
There are only three, and they are deliberately minimal:
- Googlebot must not be blocked from the page, no
robots.txtdisallow, no login wall, no server error. - The page must return a success status code (HTTP 200).
- The page must have indexable content, real HTML that renders, not an empty shell.
If a page fails any of these, nothing else matters. No amount of content quality or link authority compensates for a page Google cannot fetch.
Spam policies
These cover cloaking, doorway pages, scraped content, hidden text, link schemes, expired-domain abuse and scaled content abuse. Violations lead to lower ranking or complete removal, and recovery is slow.
Alien Road recommends: start every audit at the technical tier, not the content tier. In our project work the majority of “we are not ranking” cases turn out to be a blocked resource, a stray noindex, or a soft 404, problems that no amount of content rewriting would have fixed. Confirm the page is fetchable, returns 200 and renders content before you spend a single hour on copy.
Best practices
Useful titles, descriptive link text, readable URLs, alt text on images, and content that answers the question the visitor actually had. These do not guarantee ranking; they remove the friction that stops a good page from being understood.