Editorial Policy: How Our Guides Are Made and Checked

This page says how the guides on GreenlightMySite are made, including the parts a skeptical reader should know about. If a rule here is not followed on some page, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Who is responsible

GreenlightMySite is an independent publication operated by Stéphane Cardon, a network and cybersecurity engineer. He is the publisher and is responsible for what appears on the site, including mistakes. Guides are published under the byline of the editorial team, not under a personal name, because the work is collective: drafting, checking and testing are separate steps.

How a guide is produced

1. Topic. We pick questions people actually ask about getting approved, found and trusted, and questions our own tools make us ask. Each guide targets one search intent, so two guides never compete for the same question.
2. Drafting with AI assistance. First drafts are written with the help of an AI language model. We say so because Google’s advertising policies single out auto-generated content that has not been reviewed or curated, and because you deserve to know. A draft is never published as it comes out.
3. Fact-checking against primary sources. Statements about what Google requires or allows are checked against Google’s own documentation, and the page links it in the Sources section. Statements about protocols (HTTP, robots.txt, ads.txt) are checked against their specifications. When a source says nothing on a point, the guide says “Google does not publish this” instead of filling the gap with a plausible number.
4. Measurement. Every number that is not from a source comes from something we measured: our own server logs, our own audits, or a test we ran. The guide says which, and gives the date.
5. Checking the advice. Configuration snippets are written for the server software they name and checked against that software’s documentation. The checks we recommend are the ones our own tools run, and we run them on this site first.
6. Editorial pass. A final read removes filler, repetition and anything that sounds like marketing. A guide that cannot say something specific is not published.

What we do not do

• We do not publish a number as a rule when it is a habit. A minimum domain age, a minimum page count or a minimum traffic level for AdSense are not published by Google, so we never present them as requirements.
• We do not promise approval, rankings or revenue. No tool, including ours, can.
• We do not use AI-generated images. Photographs come from a free-licence library and every photographer is credited on the credits page.
• We do not publish affiliate links or sponsored content. There is no advertising on the site today, and the privacy policy will change before there is.

Data and privacy in our own studies

Some guides use our server logs. We publish counts and shares, never IP addresses, and we group requests by type of client. Audits you run are held in memory for about thirty minutes and then dropped, as described in the privacy policy.

Updates and corrections

Guides show a published date and, when we change substance, an updated date. Typo fixes do not change the date. Substantive corrections are listed in the changelog. To report an error, write to hello@greenlightmysite.com with the page, the sentence and, if you can, a source. Factual corrections are made quickly and without argument when the source holds up.

Independence

We do not accept payment to mention a product or to rank one thing above another. Tools we mention are mentioned because they are relevant to the topic.