Duplicate Content Filter: What it is and how it works

Duplicate Content has become a huge topic of discussion lately, thanks to the new filters that search engines have implemented. This article will help you understand why you might be caught in the filter, and ways to avoid it. We'll also show you how you can determine if your pages have duplicate content, and what to do to fix it. Search engine spam is any deceitful attempts to deliberately trick the search engine into returning inappropriate, redundant, or poor-quality search results. Many times this behavior is seen in pages that are exact replicas of other pages

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Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs

The Issue at Hand Websites that utilize databases which can insert content into a webpage by way of a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript are increasingly popular. This type of site is considered dynamic. Many websites choose dynamic content over static content. This is because if a website has thousands of products or pages, writing or updating each static by hand is a monumental task. There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a sc

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The Importance of Backlinks

If you've read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you've come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines. What are "backlinks"

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The Age of a Domain Name

One of the many factors in Google's search engine algorithm is the age of a domain name. In a small way, the age of a domain gives the appearance of longevity and therefore a higher relevancy score in Google. Driven by spam sites which pop up and die off quickly, the age of the domain is usually a sign whether or not a site is yesterday's news or tomorrow's popular site. We see this in the world of business, for example. While the novelty that may go with a new store in town brings a short burst of initial business, people tend to trust a business that has been aro

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Ranking in Country Specific Search Engines

In the world of Search Engine Optimization, Location is important. Search engines like to bring relevant results to a user, not only in the area of keywords and sites that give the user exactly what they are looking for, but also in the correct language as well. It doesn't do a lot of good for a Russian-speaking individual to continually get websites returned in a search query that are written in Egyptian or in Chinese. So a search engine has to have some way to be able to return the results the user is looking for in the right language, and a search engine's goal is a

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Optimization, Over-Optimization or SEO Overkill?

The fight to top search engines' results knows no limits – neither ethical, nor technical. There are often reports of sites that have been temporarily or permanently excluded from Google and the other search engines because of malpractice and using “black hat” SEO optimization techniques. The reaction of search engines is easy to understand – with so many tricks and cheats that SEO experts include in their arsenal, the relevancy of returned results is seriously compromised to the point where search engines start to deliver completely irrelevant and manipulated search results. And even if sea

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See Your Site With the Eyes of a Spider

Making efforts to optimize a site is great but what counts is how search engines see your efforts. While even the most careful optimization does not guarantee tops position in search results, if your site does not follow basic search engine optimisation truths, then it is more than certain that this site will not score well with search engines. One way to check in advance how your SEO efforts are seen by search engines is to use a search engine simulator. Spiders ExplainedBasically all search engine spiders function on the same principle – they crawl the Web and index pages,

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Optimizing for Yahoo!

Back in the dawn of the Internet, Yahoo! was the most popular search engine. When Google arrived, its indisputably precise search results made it the preferred search engine. However, Google is not the only search engine and it is estimated that about 20-25% or searches are conducted on Yahoo! Another major player on the market is MSN, which means that SEO professionals cannot afford to optimize only for Google but need to take into account the specifics of the other two engines (Yahoo! and MSN) as well. Optimizing for three search engines at the same time is not an easy task.

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Jumping Over the Google Sandbox

It's never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don't rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new do

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What is Robots.txt

Robots.txtIt is great when search engines frequently visit your site and index your content but often there are cases when indexing parts of your online content is not what you want. For instance, if you have two versions of a page (one for viewing in the browser and one for printing), you'd rather have the printing version excluded from crawling, otherwise you risk being imposed a duplicate content penalty. Also, if you happen to have sensitive data on your site that you do not want the world to see, you will also prefer that search engines do not index these pages (although in

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Bad Neighborhood

Has it ever happened to you to have a perfectly optimized site with lots of links and content and the right keyword density and still do not rank high in search engines? Probably every SEO has experienced this. The reasons for such kind of failure can be really diverse – starting from the sandbox effect (your site just needs time to get mature), to overoptimization and inappropriate online relations (i.e. the so called “bad neighborhood” effect). While there is not much you can do about the sandbox effect but wait, in most other cases it is up to you to counteract the negative

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Optimizing Flash Sites

If there is a really hot potato that divides SEO experts and Web designers, this is Flash. Undoubtedly a great technology to include sounds and picture on a Web site, Flash movies are a real nightmare for SEO experts. The reason is pretty prosaic – search engines cannot index (or at least not easily) the contents inside a Flash file and unless you feed them with the text inside a Flash movie, you can simply count this text lost for boosting your rankings. Of course, there are workarounds but until search engines start indexing Flash movies as if they were plain text, these workar

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Your Website from Google Banned to Google Unbanned

Even if you are not looking for trouble and do not violate any known Google SEO rule, you still might have to experience the ultimate SEO nightmare - being excluded from Google’s index. Although Google is a kind of a monopolist among search engines, it is not a bully company that excludes innocent victims for pure pleasure. Google keeps rigorously to SEO best practices and excludes sites that misbehave. If you own and run a blog or website then being listed by Google is a very important step so it is read by as many people as possible; but what if your website gets Google b

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