High Impact SEO Blog

This article will outline the five most common ranking factors that can have a negative impact on your SEO campaign. In order to rank highly in google you will need to ensure that you avoid each and every one of these bad practices and the ranking penalties that they can bring about.

1. Duplicate content.
Googles overarching mission is to provide its users with high quality information which is relevant to the search query that they submitted, therefore it will come as no great suprise to learn the Google has effective measures in place to make sure that the top ten results for any given keyword do not comprise of pages containing identical content. One of the means that Google uses to achieve this is by penalising pages that contain content which originated on another website.
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Sitemaps provide a means by which webmasters can inform and direct spiders, they help Google and other search engines to index more pages and discover new content more quickly and effectively. They are also useful for ensuring that all your pages are found and indexed.

Submitting a sitemap to Google is free and simple to do. Ideally you should create your sitemap in XML format, once it has been uploaded to your domains root directory you can submit it by loggin into your Google webmaster tools account. Remember that you will need to update the sitemap and resubmit it everytime you add, delete, or move pages in your website.
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The rel=”canonical” attribute can be used to avoid duplicate content penalties when a domain has more than one page which displays very simular, or identical content. The correct use of this attribute tells search engines which version of the page to index, furthermore it also passes link juice from the other similar or identical pages to the prefered version you have specified, thereby avoiding duplicate content penalies.

This method is useful if for instance you have a website with price lists in different currencies there could be several pages with almost identical content, specifying a canonical page will not only allow you to avoid duplicate content penalties for these pages, but google will also view all inbound links for the simular pages as though they were linking the single page you specify as “preferred” in the canonical attribute. this can obviously have a major positive effect on that pages position in google’s results.
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