Jul 6, 2009

How to avoid duplicacy of pages and content in websites

Duplicacy of pages add no real content to the web and do nothing to improve the quality of the search engines output. By offering the same document over and over search engines would offer a horrible product with no variety. For this reason, duplicate pages are often filtered out. This is the exact reason Yahoo! dislikes many affiliate websites.

Duplicacy of content and pages are major cause for search engine optimization.Even if search engines like Google will not always penalizes you for duplicate content, they will still have to choose one of the URLs / pages to show in search results and ignore all other duplicates.

If problem is related with WWW-pages and non WWW-pages URLs in the generated XML sitemap will then either be with or without www which may differ from the paths search engines such as Google.

To avoid duplicate content use canonical URL in wordpress.This is the definition given in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that’s accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

It is very easy to specify the canonical URL of a page – all you have to do is add this line in the head section…

The purpose of this tag is to prevent the problem of duplicate content.

The best thing about this tag is that all three major search engines(Google, Yahoo and MS Live) support this initiative.
header.php

Go to the theme folder in wordpress(wp-content/themes/
) and open the file header.php in your favorite editor. Now find the line…

and add the following code before that line…



" />

Now, it should look something like this…

" />

That’s it - you are done! Save the file and upload it to your server.

This fix will add the canonical URL tag to all the posts and pages of your blog. If you want to see a blog that have implemented this fix, take a look at the source of this page.

What is a canonical URL?

If you already know you would be surprised at how few webmasters have ever heard of a canonical URL. If you also spend time in Google Groups you will find people scratching their heads and not getting a clear answer as to how to troubleshoot and resolve this troublesome issue in Google.


Jul 2, 2009

PR Update and SEO Updates

Search engines are changing their techniques day by day. So every coming day brings some SEO updates for webmasters. Search engine like Google use to change its algorithms after couple of weeks that’s why some time PR update brings some unexpected and shocking results.
As every body use to search the desired information through some search engine, most probably Google. Obviously, every one wants to touch relevant date instead of wandering around the different sites. Search engine help us by sorting out the sites in such a way that the most relevant site comes up in top results. So in order to bring their sites among the top results webmasters use different techniques and the process of bringing these sites at the top of the list by using SEO updates in legalized way is called white hat SEO.

Search engines use different algorithms in order to sort out the data in better and faster way. However, the most successful and popular of all algorithms was developed in Stanford University by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This algorithm was named Page ranking.  The prototype of this algorithm was launched in the market in 1998 with the name of “Google”.

Page rank algorithm was based on votes. For example, a link from site X to site Y is counted as a vote from site X for site Y. The site which has the more votes means have more back links will be considered more important and will get a higher “page rank”. One interesting fact is that Google assess the importance of a site through the sites from where it is getting back links. No doubt every back link is considered as a vote but different votes have different values. That means if your site get a back link from a site which has a good page rank and healthy back links that will ultimately affect the ranking of your site in next PR update.

So we can say that more and more back links is not the only way of optimizing your site for high search engine ranking. Rather then that if you want to see your site with good page rank after next PR update then don’t go for back links only, instead of this try to go for quality back links. Rather then back links, search engine also consider many other factors while allocating page rank, so webmasters should keep an eye on SEO updates, in order to get the idea about the working of search engine algorithms. Some times sites having healthy back links fail to get good page rank during PR update rather then that Google penalizes those sites which use to get back link by using black hat techniques. While if you will upload sites of same nich on the same ip of the hosting it may effect the google page rank of your sites.

In short we can say that search engines optimization is not a rocket science rather then it is the name of continuously changing field, in which you can get guidance through SEO updates or you can also try your ways by following search engine guidelines. It really needs some thing beyond expertise. People who are working in this widespread field of search engine optimization love to get useful SEO updates.

LIVE SEO NEWS © 2008.

TOPO