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What is Duplicate Content?

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Duplicate content is content that appears on the Internet in more than one place (URL). When there are multiple pieces of identical content on the Internet, it is difficult for search engines to decide which version is more relevant to a given search query. To provide the best search experience, search engines will rarely show multiple duplicate pieces of content and thus, are forced to choose which version is most likely to be the original—or best. The Three Biggest Issues with Duplicate Content Search engines don't know which version(s) to include/exclude from their indices Search engines don't know whether to direct the link metrics (trust, authority, anchor text, link juice, etc.) to one page, or keep it separated between multiple versions Search engines don't know which version(s) to rank for query results When duplicate content is present, site owners suffer rankings and traffic losses, and search engines provide less relevant results. Duplicate Con

What is XML Sitemap in SEO?

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The moment you setup a site in WordPress you are advised to use XML sitemap so that your sitemaps can be auto generated and google can be informed about your blog/website pages and it can be crawled. Way back in the “good old days” of SEO, many “SEO firms” made a pretty good living “submitting your website to thousands of search engines.” While that has never been a sound tactic/method of achieving SEO nirvana, today’s SEO provides us with opportunities to ensure that we get our content – in all shapes, sizes, and forms – indexed in the search engines, to the best of our ability. When it comes to the crawling phase of SEO and bot visibility, we often first check what we hold from search engines via robots.txt and meta robots tag usage. But equally important is the content/URLs that we feed search engines. Long ago, the best practice was to create an HTML sitemap of at least all your higher-level pages and link this HTML sitemap from the footer of all site pages. Thi

What is Google Webmaster Tools?

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Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As of May 20, 2015, Google re-branded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console. And the best part? It’s absolutely free. If you don’t have a GWT account, then you need to go get one now. This guide to Google Webmaster Tools will walk you through the various features of this tool, and give you insight into what actionable data can be found within. (For more in-depth help, go to Google’s Webmaster Help.) Verification Before you can access any data on your site, you have to prove that you’re an authorized representative of the site. This is done through a process of verification. There are five main methods of verification currently in place for GWT. There’s no real preference as to which method you use, although the first two tend to be the most commonly used as they’ve

What is a schema tag?

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Schema is a type of microdata that makes it easier for search engines to parse and interpret the information on your web pages more effectively so they can serve relevant results to users based on search queries. What do you mean by schema? A schema is a collection of database objects (as far as this hour is concerned—tables) associated with one particular database username. This username is called the schema owner, or the owner of the related group of objects. You may have one or multiple schemas in a database.

What is a backlink?

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In search engine optimization ( SEO ) terminology a backlink is a hyperlink that links from a Web page, back to your own Web page or Web site. Also called an Inbound Link (IBL) these links are important in determining the popularity (or importance) of your Web site.