How To Rank Highly Without Penalizing Yourself
You can beat a spammer with my post on niche SEO and you can launch a site with a clean URL structure. Now you need to find a way to get the pages you want to be seen to show up for search engine queries.
Block duplicate content with your robots.txt file
You do a search, looking for news or information, and the most relevant result appears to be a blog’s monthly archive. You click on the result and see a month’s worth of posts, and give up looking for the info. Maybe, if you are savvy, you’d have clicked the cache link in Google to have your search terms highlighted. But not likely. When dealing with blogs, consider blocking categories and monthly archives, feed URLs, and possibly even comment folders.
Duplicate content can also come from syndicated content. If you write articles for article directories, or submit press releases, that is great content that can also be posted to your own site. You are best off by altering that content enough to be unique, and/or posting the duplicate content but blocking the spiders from indexing it off of your site. If you’re not familiar with robots.txt, you can always put a meta tag in pages, to have a page not indexed, but still followed to other links, use, meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"
