Has Google set web standards too high? An SEO perspective

Every year, SEO gets harder. Not because search is fundamentally broken - but because Google keeps raising the bar.

Want to rank competitively in 2025? Your site needs to load fast on flaky mobile networks, offer pixel-perfect user experiences across 20 languages, and be easier for bots to navigate than a clean XML sitemap. Oh, and if you mess up just one thing? That might be enough to hold you back for months.

The question is: have Google’s expectations outpaced what’s reasonable?

Let’s unpack the increasingly high standards Google has set for modern websites - and whether SEOs are being asked to do the impossible.

The bar isn’t just high - it’s moving

Google’s guidance is rarely static. What was best practice last year might be deprecated today. And the web itself is evolving faster than many site owners can keep up.

What used to be a game of keywords and backlinks is now a multidisciplinary effort involving frontend performance, server infrastructure, internationalization, design accessibility, AI-generated summaries, structured data accuracy, and - don’t forget - content.

In other words: Google’s standards are no longer just about SEO. They’re about the entire website experience.

And while some of these changes have made the web better, others have made it nearly impossible for small teams - or even medium-sized companies - to keep up.

Let’s walk through five examples of where the bar may have gotten too high.

01. Core Web Vitals: Engineering-level demands for marketing teams

The rollout of Core Web Vitals (CWV) changed the game. LCP, CLS, and now INP are performance metrics tied not just to user experience - but to actual rankings.

On paper, that’s great. We all want faster, more stable sites.

In reality? It’s a nightmare for most site owners.

Here’s what Google expects:

• Your Largest Contentful Paint should occur within 2.5s

• You should have near-zero layout shift (CLS)

• The time between a user interaction and next paint (INP) should be < 200ms

• Your real-user data (CrUX) must reflect this on mobile, across all countries, not just lab conditions

Meeting these thresholds requires a deep understanding of frontend engineering, server-side rendering, lazy loading, font loading strategies, JavaScript hydration timing, and dozens of other nuances most SEOs were never trained to handle.

And this isn’t just theory. Sites with subpar CWV scores can and do lose rankings - not overnight, but gradually, as their better-performing competitors rise.

So now, instead of publishing great content, SEOs are:

• Analyzing field vs lab data in Lighthouse

• Debugging third-party JavaScript

• Fighting to inline critical CSS

• Auditing how click handlers delay INP

You either become a performance engineer - or you hope your dev team takes this seriously.

That’s not “raising the bar.” That’s asking marketing teams to do the work of an SRE.

02. Hreflang: Google’s most misunderstood ranking signal

International SEO is one of the most complex, under-resourced areas of site optimization - and hreflang is the perfect example of why.

Hreflang is supposed to help Google show the right language or country version of your content to the right users. But actually implementing it at scale?

Let’s review the hoops:

• Every alternate version of every URL needs a hreflang tag

• You must reference back and forth between all versions - aka “bidirectional tagging”

• URLs must be fully self-canonical or Google ignores the tag

• You must match exactly on URL, not just slug

• Incorrect country/language codes? The tag is ignored

• Different pages with the same language code but different regional targeting? Good luck

• Mixed use of canonical + hreflang + redirects = chaos

And you have to do this not just in HTML, but also in your XML sitemaps - consistently, with perfect parity, across potentially hundreds of thousands of pages and dozens of language pairs.

One minor config error or CMS bug? Boom - Google skips the entire set and serves the wrong version in the wrong market.

Even large enterprise sites with full engineering teams regularly mess this up.

The standard here isn’t “provide clear signals.” It’s “solve an NP-complete problem with no native CMS support, then maintain it perfectly, forever.”

03. Structured data: Punished for being too correct

Structured data is supposed to help machines understand your content. That makes sense.

But Google’s actual use of schema markup is a minefield:

• You must match schema data perfectly to visible content, or you risk a manual penalty

• Certain schemas (e.g., FAQ, HowTo) stopped generating rich results - even if correctly implemented

• New features (e.g., Product snippet images, pricing) are rolled out with unclear documentation and easily break with minor site updates

• Schema validator tools often conflict: Search Console says one thing, Schema.org validator says another, and third-party plugins still inject the wrong fields

Even if you follow every guideline, Google may still ignore your schema - or worse, show it briefly and then pull it after an algorithm update.

The result? SEOs are forced to:

• Monitor schema volatility across hundreds of templates

• Reverse-engineer why Google stopped showing rich snippets even when the markup is valid

• Justify the dev time for markup that may or may not impact anything

Schema should be a helpful signal. Instead, it often feels like a trap for sites trying too hard to follow the rules.

04. Thin content & helpful content: But what does “helpful” mean?

Google’s Helpful Content System aims to reward content “written for people, not for search engines.” Totally fair.

But their standards for helpfulness aren’t just editorial - they’re algorithmic, opaque, and sometimes contradictory.

You could be:

• Writing accurate, well-researched content in your niche

• Using original examples, clear formatting, and internal links

• Updating regularly with user-focused improvements

…and still get swept up in a sitewide content demotion because some blog posts didn’t meet an undefined “quality threshold.”

And once you’ve been hit? Recovery is vague, slow, and rarely confirmed.

There’s no “HCU penalty notice” in Search Console. You just watch your traffic fall off a cliff - and hope your rewrites eventually earn forgiveness.

This isn’t a manual action. It’s an algorithmic suppression with no transparency, no appeal process, and unclear triggers.

“Write helpful content” is a noble goal. But in practice, it’s become an impossible standard: be helpful - but in a way the algorithm understands.

05. Crawl optimization: Because Google can’t afford to crawl your site?

Google has 10x more compute power than most countries. Yet it still offloads the burden of crawling and indexing onto site owners.

Don’t want stale results in the index? Better:

• Use robots.txt to block all non-canonical junk

• Optimize crawl paths to avoid traps

• Consolidate duplicate pages with canonical, noindex, and internal linking

• Make sure JS-rendered links are crawlable

• Eliminate pagination loops and orphaned pages

• Keep server response times under control, or you’ll be deprioritized

• Use sitemaps - but don’t submit too many, or your priority signals will be diluted

All of this is just to help Googlebot do its job.

On large or headless sites, crawling issues are common even when you follow best practices. Add dynamic parameters, locale-specific paths, inconsistent linking - and Googlebot’s crawl budget gets wasted on low-value junk.

The message here is loud and clear: Google expects you to clean up your architecture before it even considers indexing your content.

Are Google’s standards “too high”? Depends who you ask

From Google’s point of view, all of this makes sense:

• Better performance improves user experience

• Correct hreflang prevents bad search results

• Structured data powers helpful UI features

• Helpful content fights spam and AI sludge

• Clean architecture helps Google scale efficiently

And in isolation, each of these goals is reasonable.

The issue is cumulative complexity.

Modern SEO isn’t just about understanding algorithms - it’s about orchestrating dozens of highly technical signals across dev teams, CMS limitations, localization workflows, content pipelines, and ever-changing documentation.

That’s not scalable for most teams. Especially when:

• Dev teams are stretched thin

• SEO tools offer conflicting advice

• Google rolls out guidance without warning

• There’s no feedback loop when things go wrong

So yes - Google has made the web better. But it’s also created a system where only the most resource-rich sites can truly keep up.

What can SEOs do about it?

You’re not going to change Google. But you can work smarter within the system. Here’s how:

1. Prioritize ruthlessly 

You can’t fix everything. Focus on the SEO efforts that move the needle: technical hygiene, content quality, and internal linking.

2. Build internal buy-in 

You need dev support to pass CWV and implement hreflang. Make the business case. Show how SEO issues impact real traffic and revenue.

3. Use real-world metrics 

Don’t optimize blindly. Use CrUX, GSC, and log files to find your actual issues - not theoretical ones.

4. Automate where possible 

Use templates, plugins, and scheduled audits to scale schema, metadata, hreflang, and performance checks.

5. Be loud about limitations Push back when expectations are unreasonable. Not every site needs perfect CWV. Not every blog post needs AI-detectable “helpfulness.”

Google sets the rules. But you decide how much effort each rule is worth.

Final word: SEO is harder than ever - but not hopeless

Yes, Google’s standards are high. Sometimes absurdly so. But there’s also an opportunity here: most sites won’t meet them. So if you can get even halfway there consistently, you’re ahead of the game.

Don’t chase perfection.

Chase clarity. Consistency. Crawlability. Quality.