Miva SEO Tips on Using Quotes in Your Store and Working on Development Servers

Using Quotes in Miva Merchant Stores

Using quotes ( " ) in your store especially with template modules has been discussed previously in regards to product and category names. Since then I have discovered that it is even problematic in category headers, product descriptions, etc. The reason is related to quotes in alt tags. You can't have quotes in meta tags either. Quotes close the tag abruptly before you want it to end.

<meta name="description" content="We have 1"

Instead of that, it could be <meta name="description" content="We have 1 inch heels by Prada">. You could use inch or inches but &quot; works too. It still gives the appearance of quotes without using them. The only problem with that is when the following appears in meta tags.

<meta name="description" content="We have 1&quot; heels by Prada">

Read the following article on meta tags for the perfect solution.

Using A Development Server and Getting into Trouble

With the recent revelation that Google doesn't even like any content that appears to be even remotely duplicate on the same domain, it is a shame that people are being caught with what has always been considered evil--duplicate content on a different domain. People are using development servers to test new designs, etc. but letting links to these slip out into places like the Miva Merchant users list where search engine spiders can pick them up.

To not worry about this problem, simply put a robots.txt file on your development server that contains the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This tells all search engines to not index anything.

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