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Excerpt: This is a technique I've seen applied to bulletin boards, but never on eCommerce sites, and I'm not sure why. Really, I'm not sure. So you have an eCommerce site, let's call it something cliche like "DiscountWidgets.com." A user types the query "inexpensive macintosh compatible widget." He sees a SERP that's highlighted with relevant-looking text bolded in the excerpted copy, but he want to see more.  That's nice, but when he gets to the page,…

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Excerpt: This is an old topic for me; one that I feel is largely ignored by the SEM community. I asked Jake Baillie of TrueLocal at an SES conference awhile back, and he suggested that breadcrumbs are trouble when it comes to duplicate content no-matter-what, and, of course, I used to work for Barry Schwartz of RustyBrick, who is a big believer in breadcrumbs, but believes that the search engines should just "deal with it." He may have changed his mind, so take it with a grain of salt.  Do…

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Excerpt: Here I am, minding my own business, trying to write a rule for mod_rewrite that redirects /blog/ to / so there's no duplicate content (just in case I missed a homepage link in the template — or someone links it — it gets redirected).  And here I am discovering that Yahoo (quite lamely) doesn't support .htaccess files at all. Wow, this totally stinks.This comes after also discovering that Yahoo also doesn't allow their managed WordPress installation to go in the root directory,…