Is it ok to add snippet of information taken from other sites on product pages?
-
Hello here,
I own an e-commerce website that sells digital sheet music, and I would like to enrich my product pages with short references to artists/composers related to the product, taken from external websites such as mentions, fresh news, information taken from related videos, cross-references, etc. In other words, I'd like to provide our users with a different kind of informational content that our competitors are currently not offering. We could also think of this like "providing some sort of aggregate content on product pages to enrich the user's experience by providing more information about the product".
What do you think are the risks or the benefits of such an approach? And if there are any risks, how to avoid/tackle them?
Any thoughts are very welcome!
Thank you in advance to anyone.
-
Yes, I agree with you Todd, thank you for your reply!
-
Hi Fabrizo,
This makes sense.
If this is the case, I would focus on using as much meta data as possible, and not text in the form of sentence and paragraph structure from other websites. Let the user comments and reviews, for now, form the bulk of written text, and then when you can add your unique text this will help.
This way the percentage of duplicate text in the form of sentence structure is reduced. It's not a permanent fix, but might help in the meantime as you build those unique write ups.
You see this concept in product specification sites, and in real estate meta data listings.
Hope this helps,
Todd -
Thank you Todd. Yes, that's of course our first plan of action: writing custom and unique editorial reviews together with user reviews, and we are doing that (slowly), but if that were my only plan, it would take years to have custom reviews with references for each of our product pages (we have thousands of product pages), so my idea was really to offer our users more info and references to extend their knowledge on each product in a more "automatic/algorithmic" way, so that we can offer such a "fresh" and interesting content faster... think of this, for example, if the product is the Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, I could:
1. Add references to related videos.
2. Add references and info taken from famous articles on this famous piece
3. Add news related to this composition (latest recordings, performances, etc).
4. Teaching material, etc.
And of course allow users to comment and discuss on each of the above.
That's the basic idea. My real concern here is if, by doing all this, Google could penalize me to "aggregate" partial text taken from other websites (aka: "content duplication").
Thank you!
-
Thank you Richard for your reply.
Yes, of course, any mention or aggregated contents will have a clear reference to the source, no doubts on that. Links to the source will allow users, if interested, to learn more about the subject.
As for your suggested gdgt.com, I see on their product pages editorial reviews, no really references on eternal sites as I have suggested here.... am I missing something?
Thank you again for your thoughts.
-
Fabrizo,
You will want to ensure that there is an adequate amount of editorial, unique content driving each of those pages on your website. Aggregating content is great, but Google really wants to see your personal interpretation / review / opinion on that set of information, so think about ways in which you can potentially generate unique 200 word "final thoughts' or reviews / editorials on each product internally.
-
Fabrizio,
Obviously it would be a concern if another company thought you were stealing their content and infringing upon it, without at least a link back, so you might want to reach out to those companies before you post any of their content.
My suggestion would be to look at what, GDGT.com is doing it sounds like what you want to do is what they're doing in the electronic space.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
After adding a ssl certificate to my site I encountered problems with duplicate pages and page titles
Hey everyone! After adding a ssl certificate to my site it seems that every page on my site has duplicated it's self. I think that is because it has combined the www.domainname.com and domainname.com. I would really hate to add a rel canonical to every page to solve this issue. I am sure there is another way but I am not sure how to do it. Has anyone else ran into this problem and if so how did you solve it? Thanks and any and all ideas are very appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LovingatYourBest0 -
Site migration - 301 or 404 for pages no longer needed?
Hi I am migrating from my old website to a new one on a different, server with a very different domain and url structure. I know it's is best to change as little as possible but I just wasn't able to do that. Many of my pages can be redirected to new urls with similar or the same content. My old site has around 400 pages. Many of these pages/urls are no longer required on the new site - should I 404 these pages or 301 them to the homepage? I have looked through a lot of info online to work this out but cant seem to find a definative answer. Thanks for this!! James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Curran0 -
How to associate content on one page to another page
Hi all, I would like associate content on "Page A" with "Page B". The content is not the same, but we want to tell Google it should be associated. Is there an easy way to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Viewpoints1 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site?
A client site has thousands of pages with unoptimized urls. I want to change the url structure to make them a little more search friendly. Many of the pages I want to update have backlinks to them and good PR so I don't want to delete them entirely. If I change the urls on thousands of pages, that means a lot of 301 redirects. Will thousands of redirected pages have a negative impact on the site? Thanks, Dino
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Dino641 -
How to avoid content canibalizm? How do I control which page is the landing page?
Hi All, To clarify my question I will give an example. Let's assume that I have a laptop e-commerce site and that one of my main categories is Samsung Laptops. The category page shows lots of laptops and a small section of text. On the other hand, in my article section I have a HUGE article about Samsung Laptops. If we consider the two word phrases each page is targeting then the answer is the same - Samsung Laptops. On the article i point to the category page using anchor such as "buy samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops" and on the category page (my wishful landing page) I point to the article with "learn about samsung laptops" or "samsung laptops pros and cons". Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
To land page or not to land page
Hey all, I wish to increase my sites rankings on a variety of keywords within sub categories but I'm unsure where to be spending the time in SEO. Here's an example of the website page structure: General Home Page > Sub Category 1 Home Page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DPSSeomonkey
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 > Sub Category 2 Home Page
> Searching / Results pages
- Sub Category 1
- Sub Category 2
- Sub Category 3
- Sub Category 4 We've newly introduced the Sub Category Home Pages and I was wondering if SEO is best performed on these pages or should landing pages be built, one for each of the 4 sub categories in each section. Those landing pages would have links to the "Searching / Results pages" for that sub category. Thanks!0 -
How Fast Is Too Fast to Increase Page Volume of Your Site
I am working on a project that is basically a site to list apartment for rent (similar to apartments.com or rent.com). We want to add a bunch of amenity pages, price pages, etc. Basically increasing the page count on the site and helping users be able to have more pages relevant to their searches and long tail phrases. So an example page would be Denver apartments with a pool would be one page and Seattle apartments under 900 would be another page etc. By doing this we will take the site from about 14,000 pages or so to over 2 million by the time we add a list of amenities to every city in the US. My question is should I worry about time release on them? Meaning do you think we would get penalized for launching that many pages overnight or over the course of a week? How fast is too fast to increase the content on your site? The site about a year old and we are not trying to scam anything just looking to site functionality and page volume. Any advice?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ioV0