To make sure there’s no duplicate content of a website is one of the most important things we do in our SEO work. It is well known that Google has penalty on the duplicate content. Search engines dislike duplicate content because they don’t want to show same pages on their search result pages. However, people don’t realize that sometimes they have mistakenly duplicated content by themselves. People could make this mistake mainly in three ways:
♦ Duplicate domain
Lots of people use both .com and .co.uk for their websites without a 301 redirect. It means that you have two identical websites with same content. It’s unlikely they will both rank for the same keywords and you might be penalized by Google for having same content. Therefore, if you’re aiming for the UK market more than the others, you might be better to redirect the .com to co.uk. A unique domain is as important as unique content.
♦ www and non-www
Search engines don’t always recognize that the same page is being presented multiple ways because they index URLs rather than pages. So if your website can be displayed in both http://www.example.com and http://domain.com, you need to redirect the non-www one to www. You can do this with an .htaccess file in Apache server and change configuration through administrative console in IIS server.
♦ Internal links
Try to keep your internal linking consistently. For example, you might use both www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html pointing to your homepage. It’s better for you to use just www.example.com linking to homepage instead of index page when you design your site.
Lili
SEO Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
One of the hardest parts about being an affiliate is keeping the links, banners and products on your website up to date with the merchants. If you’re still showing banners for products the merchants are no longer selling you’re wasting valuable real estate on your website. Worse yet, when someone clicks through to buy the product you’re promoting and they find it doesn’t exist; you’ve lost the chance of a return customer.
Worse even still, if you’re a PPC affiliate you’re paying for clicks to drive traffic to the merchant, only to find they’re not selling what you’re paying for; so you might as well be throwing your money out of a moving train.
Luckily the network provider Affiliate Window has a solution to all of these problems. Their new Shop Window is now in Beta testing and it allows you to promote every product within their database, dynamically.
I say solution, but things like this have existed for years such as Amazon’s product feed that offered affiliates the chance to build applications to promote any product within the Amazon database. The problem there was that Amazon stores were difficult to set up and unless you used third party scripts such as the one from Mr Rat anyone without serious developer knowledge was alienated.
Affiliate Window however has created their Shop Window to be as simple as installing Wordpress. Actually, it’s easier than installing Wordpress because you don’t even need to set up a database. You simply sign up with Affiliate Window, download the Shop Window script unzip it and then upload it to your web server.
That’s it. No configuration required. You now have a working store that contains products from every merchant that offers a product fee in Affiliate Window. That’s over 3.5 Million products!
Of course doing this isn’t going to make you the next Amazon. You need to target niche markets and filter out the products you don’t want. For example, you could choose a domain name about Star Wars, upload your shop and create static pages that display only Star Wars products. As the Merchants include retailers like Toys R Us there will be hundreds if not thousands of Star Wars products, from toys to DVDs to Video Games.
Then you promote your new Star Wars store with some natural SEO, or some PPC for specific product names if you’re feeling confident, and wait for the money to flood in.
Obviously there’s a little more to it than this, but we’ll go into specifics for setting up the stores and promoting them in later blogs. Plus the code is still only in Beta testing, so things may change; but the principal will be the same and the potential is there to see.
Darren
Affiliate Marketing
Posted in Affiliate Marketing | No Comments »
