One problem for webmasters and web designers is the fear of duplicating content on a website.

Google has systems in place to scan for duplicated content across websites, and apply the appropriate penalties to those who “rip” content off another website and claim it as their own.

Fresh, unique content is by far the best way to add value and interest in your website, and for the most part, majority of webmasters create these sort of articles and content items, however sometimes, Google and other search engines can penalize your site for duplicate content, because the same content appears on two or more URLS in your site.

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The Google Page Rank is metric used by Google to assign value to a web page. Basically, the higher the PR the more valuable Google sees your site as a resource. So what are the advantages of getting a higher PR you ask? Well, we are going to take a look at these advantages and how to increase your own page rank in this article.
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Last night for a period of about 15 - 20 minutes, the most popular search engine in the world decided that it would flag every website on the internet as being Malware, and pushed everyone who clicked on a link to a page indicating that the site was Malware and should not be viwed.

Although this only took place for about 20mins, twitter  lit up immediatly with #googlemayharm and other similar tweets. It just goes to show how reliant the world is becoming on always having access to services such as Google, and when things start to go wrong, how quickly users from the community respond.

Everything seems fine now, most likely just a glitch on Googles behalf.

Continuing our e-commerce articles, we are going to look into what you can do to help market your online store once it is up and running. It is one thing having an online store, but another to drive traffic to the site and convert browsing customers into paying customers.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to successfully identify your target market. Knowing who is or will be interested in shopping on your site is a very important aspect to cover. Once you know who is going to be using your site, we can start to identify areas that will appeal to the customers for our advertising.

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The Rival development team has been hard at work with the development of the new Rival CMS, Odin.

Odin CMS will allow clients to make changes to their own website using an easy to use Interface.

Rival would like to offer a sneak peek to our clients on the development progress of Odin, as it is feedback from clients that has been used to develop an even better Content Management Solution than the already excellent CMS we use in house.

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Continuing our E-commerce and online shopping, we are going to take a look at the importance of an ecommerce sites appearance and its security.
Just like the more traditional stores, online stores need to worry about security and appearance, but what exactly does this involve with an online presence?

There are many terms that get thrown around with security online, such as SSL, payments gateways, transactions etc. Throughout this guide, we hope to give you a little more insight into how you can help improve your online ecommerce presence.
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Shopping online is a totally different experience than the more traditional form of shopping in a shopping center. The main difference is that the remoteness means you are not able to physically see the product you are buying. This is where the importance of high quality, professional photographs really come into play.

The Quality:
The quality of a website and its products can be obtained by the quality of the images displayed on the site. Users of a website have no other visual cues to help them when making purchases, therefore product shots are very important.

The more professional the images on a website, the more professional the website looks. The investment in high quality professional photographs and product shots is definitely worth the investment, with sales conversions having been known to double with the addition of better imagery.

The Quantity:
There is one thing that is clear. Users like seeing more than one image of a product. Unfortunately, many ecommerce websites only show one view of the product. This takes away the user’s ability to fully grasp the scope of the product.

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Rival has recently purchased a new high-speed web server.

The new web server has been customized to ensure our CMS product runs as quickly and as smoothly as possible.

The new servers are located in Sydney, offering even additional speed for clients in the Sydney region, whilst still retaining competitive speeds on an international scale.
Most existing client’s sites will be automatically moved to the new server with little or no disruption to the website.
This new webserver will be the foundation for our new content management system that will be being released later this year.

If you would like to learn more about our new hosting platform, feel free to contact us.

Rival is glad to announce that our SEO reports have been improved.

SEO is becoming more and more essential to keep a website performing at its best. SEO generates useful traffic by focusing on keywords and phrases that relate to your products and services.
Some of the features in our SEO reports can include:

• Keyword suggestions
• Related Keywords
• Daily World Searches
• Competing Sites
• Advanced analysis
• General Optimization advice
• Keyword density

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