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Excerpt: News of how Google and Yahoo index web sites. Suppose you want to sell your product to several different countries that speak the same language.  To get the best from local search and domain authority one would need to have separate websites with completely different content. However, this seems ridiculous. Re-write the entire content because the search engine might think that you are spamming by only changing country specific variations in language and currency. Fortunately, search engineers Greg Grothaus and Priyank Garg at Google and Yahoo respectively said that this is no longer the case.  Previously, I and many other SEO’s…

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Excerpt: For those that do not know Magento is a feature packed open source ecommerce  platform. It is an excellent solution for people wanting to sell their products online. However, in the support forums there has been some concern over its ability to be made SEO friendly. We covered one method which was basically to use robots.txt to avoid crawlling those portions of the site which could possibly introduce duplicate content. This partially solves this problem but it prevents the flow of pageRank from those pages so if someone has linked to one of these duplicate copy pages you won’t get…

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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: In part I of this two part series on SEO tips for Blogs we looked at WordPress plugins, creating themes, internal linking, RSS Feeds and Blog Aggregators. In the second part of  search engine optimisation for blogs, we examine social media, external linking and how to avoid duplicate content. Social Media Twitter Twitter is a social networking site that allows you keep in touch with groups of people on the web through the passing of short messages (tweets) to say what you are doing. It sound like a ridiculous idea but it has the capability to build up a targeted audience for your…

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Excerpt: Introduction SEO specialists often quote the mantra, “Content is King” and there is nothing better to a search engine than lots of original content. However, writing original content is time consuming and therefore costly. Some less scrupulous web masters copy or plagiarise content from other websites and will publish it as their own. Search engines have ways and means of telling whether the content is original and will rank accordingly. Even if you are not stealing information, there are many other ways in which your website can fall foul of the duplicate content but there is no reason to be paranoid about…