VelisAds Network

SEO Policy

Effective date: February 17, 2026 | Version: 2026.02-global

This SEO Policy defines acceptable technical and content optimization practices for publisher websites and ad destinations participating in VelisAds Network.

The objective is durable search visibility through user-first quality, not algorithm manipulation.

Scope and Applicability

  1. Applies to publisher websites, landing pages, and supporting content assets.
  2. Applies to indexing controls, metadata, structured data, and crawl behavior.
  3. Applies to manual and AI-assisted content generation workflows.
  4. Applies to migration, redirect strategy, and canonicalization updates.
  5. Applies to all locales and language versions served by registered domains.
  6. Applies to search-quality checks during onboarding and ongoing operations.

Mandatory Requirements

Technical Baseline

  • Pages must return accurate HTTP status codes and avoid deceptive soft-404 patterns.
  • Robots rules, canonical tags, and sitemap entries must remain consistent.
  • Structured data must match visible page content and supported schemas.
  • Critical content should remain crawlable without fragile script dependencies.

Content Quality

  • Content must be original, useful, and written for user intent.
  • AI-assisted content requires editorial review for factual quality.
  • Headlines and snippets must accurately represent page content.
  • Thin, duplicate, and doorway-style pages must be consolidated or removed.

Link and UX Integrity

  • Link-building must avoid paid schemes, hidden links, and private spam networks.
  • Sponsored or affiliate links should carry proper disclosure attributes.
  • Mobile usability, accessibility, and page speed optimization are required controls.
  • Large information-architecture changes must include rollback plans.

Prohibited Practices

  1. Cloaking or serving materially different content to crawlers and users.
  2. Keyword stuffing, hidden text, and manipulative anchor abuse.
  3. Bulk backlink purchases from low-quality link networks.
  4. Mass generation of doorway pages without unique value.
  5. Fake structured-data markup used to mislead search engines.
  6. Malicious redirects, hijacked pages, or malware distribution.
  7. Programmatic content spam designed only for ranking capture.
  8. False local or service claims lacking real operational presence.

Governance, Monitoring, and Enforcement

  1. Search quality checks run during onboarding and major release milestones.
  2. Indexing drops and crawl anomalies are monitored as operational alerts.
  3. Severe violations may result in monetization restriction until remediation.
  4. Publishers must provide evidence for corrective actions on request.
  5. Policy exceptions require documented rationale and time-bounded approval.
  6. SEO incident history is retained for risk trending and recurrence prevention.
  7. Compliance reviews include content, technical, and linking dimensions.
  8. Policy updates track major changes in search engine guidance.

Global Source Links and Standards

  1. Google SEO Starter Guide
  2. Google Search Essentials
  3. Google Search Spam Policies
  4. Bing Webmaster Guidelines
  5. IETF RFC 9309 Robots Exclusion Protocol
  6. Sitemaps Protocol
  7. Schema.org Documentation
  8. W3C WCAG 2.2

Operational Interpretation and Regional Mapping

These requirements should be interpreted as global baseline controls for a live ad operations platform. Teams must map each requirement to local legal obligations, contractual duties, and traffic-source constraints before enabling production delivery at scale.

When regional regulations impose stricter standards, the stricter standard applies. Where legal ambiguity exists, operations should default to least-risk handling and documented escalation to legal or compliance owners.

Policy-to-Workflow Mapping

  • Map each policy control to one concrete workflow checkpoint.
  • Define accountable owner, review cadence, and evidence source.
  • Link policy failures to clear remediation and rollback actions.
  • Track policy exceptions with expiry and approval metadata.

Evidence and Audit Quality

  • Keep verifiable logs for approvals, enforcement, and account state changes.
  • Maintain immutable records for policy acceptance and version changes.
  • Preserve incident evidence with timestamp accuracy and actor context.
  • Support regulator and partner audits with structured evidence retrieval.

Release and Change Governance

  • Run policy impact review before major workflow or billing changes.
  • Gate high-risk releases behind compliance and security readiness checks.
  • Document rollback criteria for policy or abuse regressions.
  • Communicate material policy updates with effective-date clarity.

Extended Compliance Checklist

  1. Confirm access controls for admin, publisher, advertiser, and support roles.
  2. Verify domain ownership, sitemap coverage, and install-code integrity before launch.
  3. Validate ad creatives, landing behavior, and category eligibility rules.
  4. Ensure budget, spend, and settlement paths align with billing model selection.
  5. Run fraud and abuse controls for both ad-serving and click attribution pathways.
  6. Confirm user data handling for consent, retention, and rights-response timelines.
  7. Check payout safeguards, webhook integrity, and transaction audit visibility.
  8. Review security events, incident triage flow, and postmortem documentation quality.
  9. Ensure policy pages remain reachable, indexable, and version-consistent in sitemap.
  10. Require periodic policy refresh training for operational and support teams.

Policy FAQ for Operations Teams

How often should this policy be reviewed?

Review before each major release and at recurring governance intervals, especially when billing logic, targeting controls, or verification workflows change.

What happens if live behavior conflicts with policy text?

Live enforcement should default to safer behavior immediately, then trigger incident review and documented correction to either implementation or policy wording.

How should teams handle partner-specific requirements?

Apply partner requirements as stricter overlays where needed, while preserving baseline platform controls and maintaining auditable policy-to-process mapping.