*1 Choice 4 YStore Note* I found this article to very interesting. Especially since we are working with so many Yahoo Stores now and writing original content for their site (using blogs just like ours). I can not stress enough how original, clean, relevant content can greatly improve your natural rankings for the search engines. There is no easy way to get listed first above your competitors. It takes time and patience and above all else....CONTENT!

Duplicate content penalty. Ever heard of it? This penalty is applied by
Google and possibly other search engines when content found on your website is
largely the same as what is found elsewhere on your site or on other websites
across the internet.

Search engine spam has been common ever since search engines were first
invented. Search engine spam describes the practice of making changes to your
website that gets you listed high in search engines at the expense of
readability by humans. Years ago, you could get ranked high on a search term
simply by repeating it as many times as possible in a document. The primitive
search engines of the past ranked the importance of a keyword simply by counting
the number of times a term appeared on a page. Today's search engines are much
more complex.

Google has been waging war against all kinds of search engine spam and
especially against duplicate content in all forms. There are two main types of
duplicate content that Google is concerned about.

The first is a website that simply lists the very same page hundreds or
thousands of times with simply a few words changed. This is usually done to
attain high ranking on a wide range of keywords. It is most often used to get
ranked high on a whole bunch of keywords unrelated to your website but can
sometimes be done by a site that is on topic but simply offering duplicate
content.

The second type of duplicate content that Google is concerned about revolves
around affiliate programs. It has been common practice for high traffic websites
to establish an affiliate program. Affiliate programs themselves don't worry
Google. What it doesn't like though, is for an affiliate program to take a
template and then offer it to its base of affiliates to use. Some of the higher
traffic websites end up with thousands upon thousands of duplicate websites all
promoting the very same things and, according to Google, not offering any real
value to the internet community. A website offering this type of cookie cutter
website can easily find themselves de-listed by Google as happened to Template
Monster a while back.

The third type of duplicate content is simply not included in the Google
index. This is content that is found elsewhere on the internet at large. Google
and the other major search engines are interested in gathering and cataloging as
much quality, unique content as possible for human consumption. To this end,
they look to minimize the amount of duplicate content they allow in their index.
This is why creating a new website and simply filling it with third part content
will rarely if ever result in high rankings in the Google index.

The solution? Don't rely on duplicate content as your main method of driving
traffic to your site. Should you avoid all duplicate content? Of course not.
What kind of duplicate content is acceptable? Answering this question is easily
another article in itself.

Joe Duchesne is the co-founder of
http://www.yowling.com.
Yowling offers an easy to use web
site builder that lets you create a professional website in no time at all
for as little as $21 a month. Reprint freely as long as you keep the live links
in this resource box linking back to my website.

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