Google just released new Google Webmasters Guidelines a couple of days ago. Webmasters guidelines, which otherwise are known as the holy-grail of the SEO guidelines in online marketing community, gets updates occasionally, but this time things are different. That’s so because apart from the updates, Google also introduced some new guidelines. Some of the older guidelines will also be no longer in effect. Thus, it is apparent that unlike on previous occasions, this time web-owners need to go through the Webmaster updates more carefully.

Among the new guidelines, major ones are:

  • Adopting HTTPS (HTTP Secure) will affect a website ranking
  • Mobile SEO is also officially a part of Webmasters guidelines now (This was quite expected, as Google also released its Mobilegeddon update in early 2015)
  • Content accessibility factor is another major addition to the Webmasters guidelines

To find out which guidelines received major updates and which ones were removed, you can refer to this post.