‘Search Engines’ Category Archive

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Excerpt: Cloaking is the practice of showing a different web page to search engine bots than to your visitors in an attempt to distort rankings. The hope on the part of the cloaker is that the search engine can be shown a rich variety of content which contains the keywords they would like to be ranked for. For example a flash site that sends textual content to the search engines. This is practice is considered to be black-hat and if detected would lead to search engine retribution. So how do the search engines detect cloaked websites? When a search engine indexes…

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Excerpt: The three major search engines: Live, Yahoo and Google have agreed to adopt a new standard to highlight URLs that contain duplicate content. Duplicate content issues often occur when the same pages of content is accessed can be reached by multiple URLs or session IDs, particularly common in e-commerce sites, for example, where the same product might exist in different categories. There was always a concern that this could result in duplicate content penalties. The new attribute value is ‘canonical’ is used with the rel attribute in the links tag. It specifies the location of the page that this is a…

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Excerpt: As a postscript to my last post, I cited how one could use Yahoo Answers as a  legitimate source of relevant traffic. If you have a website in that niche area of the question, I believe it is valid to add a link to it, even though it will be no-followed. Nothing black-hat about that. When I logged into today, I find that my account was suspended. Naturally, I am pretty miffed. Searching for ‘Yahoo Answers account suspended’, it appears that there are a lot of sad cliquey losers that use this service and run multiple IDs. They can gang-report you…

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Excerpt: Yahoo Answers allows people ask and answer questions on a variety of subjects. For those that don’t know about it, someone asks a question (they are  usually quite simple questions). The question remains open for a set period of time usually , meaning that anyone with a Yahoo ID can answer. After this time the question is subject to voting where users which have reached level 2 are allowed to vote on the answers and eventually a best answer is chosen. After this the question is closed and no more answers can be added. Use the search facility to find open questions on…

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Excerpt: International SEO is becoming of increasing importance to many people. Once you have conquered a marketplace in one country you might be eager to look for new markets in other parts of the world to increase your sales. What should you be aware of when targeting search engine rankings in other countries which speak the same language? Search engines are drawing results which are biased toward a geographical locations so they will naturally favour sites representing locations in searcher’s area. However, the biggest problem with ranking international sites using the same language is  duplicate content. Google cannot determine the authorship of different…