The Website

To understand how the search engines work - and to ultimately be top ranked in the search results, it is very important to understand how a website is built up and how it should be structured.

What is the purpose of the website?

All websites are created for a purpose. For most websites, the purpose is to be helpful for users, thus having a beneficial purpose.

Some pages are created merely to make money, with little or no effort to help the users, though for example most e-commerce websites actually do help the user, if they are able to give sell the customer the product they are looking for.

And some websites are created to cause harm to users, for example by trying to misinform the user with false information (e.g fake news) or to steal private information like credit card details.

As long as a website is helpful for the user, in one way or the other, Google doesn’t consider any particular type of website to be of higher quality than others.

Yet so different, both a gossip page and an encyclopedia page can be of high quality, that is, for its respective users. Even a non-sense website has a purpose, for people who enjoy non-sense content.

The extreme importance of E.A.T. - Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

Google’s emphasis in the Quality Rater’s Handbook is the idea of E.A.T., which is a website's “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”.

In short this means a website with content that is verified and trusted will get a significantly higher ranking signal than a website with content from unverified or untrusted sources.

An example of verified and trusted content is medical information where the stated author is a verified doctor or professor, and where the author-information is for example cross-linked to her or his contact page at the university's employee page.

One of the things search engines like Google and others are most afraid of is to send its users to a website with untrusted, speculative and unverified content - potentially causing them either physical- or mental harm as a worst case scenario.

Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet vs Other layouts

As a rule of thumb, all navigation and all content should be present similarly on all device types.

Search engines like Google started to use Mobile-first crawling in 2019, meaning the Googlebot crawlers now uses the Mobile-first approach when crawling and indexing any website's content.

For website owners it is therefore crucial that any website today is fully mobile optimized, and not being mobile-optimized simply means a significant reduction in ranking, as most visitors today surf the internet using their mobile phones.

• To check if your website or a specific page is mobile-friendly, you can use the free Mobile Friendly test tool provided by Google.

In rare cases, it can make sense to provide different content or different functionality between a Desktop/Tablet-version and a Mobile-version, although this in general is something that is never recommended.