How does google recognize original content?
-
Well, we wrote our own product descriptions for 99% of the products we have. They are all descriptive, has at least 4 bullet points to show best features of the product without reading the all description. So instead using a manufacturer description, we spent $$$$ and worked with a copywriter and still doing the same thing whenever we add a new product to the website.
However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too. I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content.
I am asking it because we are a relatively new ecommerce store (online since feb 1st) while we didn't have a lot of organic traffic in the past, i see that our organic traffic dropped like 50% in April, seems like it was effected latest google update. Since we never bought a link or did black hat link building. Actually we didn't do any link building activity until last month. So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings? I see that our organic traffic is improving very very slowly since then but basically it is like between 5%-10% of our current daily traffic.
What do you guys think? You think all our original content effort is going to trash?
-
Some believe that the code of your website is taken into consideration by Google. This basically implies that duplicate content only applies to the creation of multiple blogs all coded the same with the same text. This was a tactic used by many using automated software.
This is just a rumor and from personal experience, movie news blogs and website tend to churn out identical news stories including pictures, video and text. I have not seen any of these sites being held back in their rankings.
-
Thanks.
About ten years ago I sold a lot of stuff on Amazon. Things were going well. I was the only person selling a nice selection of items. Then they started to sell the same items - and sold them at such a low price there was no way for me to make a profit. Impossible. That was just like working really really hard for someone who would become almost an impossible to beat competitor and dominate your SERPs for the next decade.
-
(offers napkin to EGOL to wipe up coffee spittle)
-
Excellent points by EGOL.
Amazon, and Walmart, are two edged swords that cut one way (you). I understand why businesses go that route, but it is very difficult to win. Sometimes someone does though:
A lady who is a friend of mine about 15 years ago took over the US arm of a German toy distributor and they created a very cool doll. Everyone with the German company and all on the US marketing team screamed they had to take it to Walmart. She politely refused to and said, let Walmart come to me. She then went all over hawking the doll and ended up on HSN. (I think that is the original big TV sales channel). About a year in everyone wanted these dolls and Walmart did not have them.
When Walmart called, she named the price - she did not have to kiss someone's... They were pleased to do the kissing.
One of my favorite stories of all time.
-
Well, sounds like i am screwed since we are sending our feeds to amazon last 7 months. I am going to update the feed and remove the descriptions from amazon feed. But i don't know if it will help me at all. By the way, i am talking about amazon ads, Not selling on amazon. However if amazon doesn't have that product in their database, they basically use your descriptions and create a product page but says this product is available on external website.
-
However since we are using a product datafeed and send it to amazon and google, they use our product descriptions too.
- spits coffee *
Whoa! I would not do that. I would remove or replace those descriptions on Amazon if at all possible.
When you sell on Amazon, any content, any image, any anything that you put on their site will be used against you. And, if you strike gold there then Amazon will quickly become your competitor.
This is exactly why I don't sell on amazon. They solicit me a couple times a year to sell my stuff on their site. No way. I did that in the past and my work benefited Amazon more than it benefited me and benefited my competitors too.
I always wait couple of days until google crawl our product pages before i send recently added products to amazon or google. I believe if google crawls our product page first, we will be the owner of the content? Am i right? If not i believe amazon is taking advantage of my original content.
This is not true. I don't care who says this is true, I am going to argue. No way. I'll argue with anybody about this. Even the big names at Google. They do a horrible job at attributing first publisher. Horrible. Horrible.
I have published a lot of content given to me by others. Other people have stolen my content. I can tell you with assurance that the powerful often wins... and if a LOT of people have grabbed your content you can lose to a ton of weak sites.
Google does not honor first publisher. They honor powerful publishers - like Amazon. Giving content to Amazon that you are going to publish on your website is feeding the snake!
So google thought that we have a shallow or duplicated content and dropped our rankings?
If your content is on Amazon, they are probably taking your traffic. Go out and look at the SERPs.
-
Serkie
Given these are product descriptions, but apply only to you selling them (even if it is through Amazon/G) I think there are a couple of ways you can go. One would be to add author markup if that is possible; I don't know how many products, etc. you are dealing with or what type of eCommerce or other platform you may be using.
Secondarily, within your actual text, you could state authorship and place a link back to you.(likely at very end of description.)
Last would be that if you register a copyright (no not a circle with a c in it as most do - the real thing) it can be fairly inexpensive. Depending how you package it to the copyright office we find it can run about a dollar a page. That would give you ownership should you ever have an issue with someone using your description without authorization (obviously you give it to Amazon and Google.)
A final note is this: when you started rewriting the descriptions my guess is you wrote, changed, rewrote, etc. In the event you ever had to defend yourself or prove you are the actual owner, in a court the documents showing how you arrived at the final are invaluable.
I don't know if this is what you were looking for, but I hope something here will help.
Best
-
For our ecommerce sites we always make sure to have original content in our product feeds as well as our pages. That way the things from our feeds don't poach from our sites and we have a broader range of search terms covered as well as avenues to be reached through.
-
Google typically looks at who published it first, as well as the authority of the sites that house the content. You could be running into problems because Amazon is going to have much more authority.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Does Google ignore content styled with 'display:none'?
Do you know if an H1 within a div that has a 'display: none' style applied will still be crawled and evaluated by Google? We have that situation on this page on line 136: view-source:https://www.junk-king.com/services/items-we-take/foreclosure-cleanouts Of course we also have an H1 up at the top of the page and are concerned that the second one will cause interference with our SEO efforts. I've seen conflicting and inconclusive information on line - not sure. Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rastellop0 -
Content Help for Dealers
What type of content would anyone recommend writing for power sports dealers (ATV dealers, Motorcycle Dealers, Jet Ski Dealers, etc) or outdoor power equipment dealers (tractors, lawn mowers, etc) when they're website consists mainly of inventory pages? These dealers are trying to improve brand awareness, but creating content that answers searchers' questions/intent is tough and I want to make sure I am on the right track. I'm trying to create unique content. I am optimizing existing pages and then so far I've been writing brand pages, describing the brands, advertising that they carry this brand, creating links and call-to-actions to the inventory pages,etc. I want to first create authority and crawlable content for this brand. From there, I have been trying to create product category pages, describing the top products under that brand and working to creating product comparison content instead of simply describing it. Why Buy type of stuff, but that gets tricky to make unique. Any suggestions on unique content or better strategies versus just brand descriptions, product descriptions/comparisons, etc? I also want to make sure that creating multiple pages focused on one brand and an overall category isn't cannibalization of a topic. Obviously each page is slightly different and gradually going into more detail, but I want to make sure. Any recommendations on types of content or different strategies would be helpful! Also - I should mention that I am limited by the platform. I cannot create/utilize a blog page or anything like that. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Crichardson19900 -
How to leverage Google Images?
My Google search rankings are improving rapidly at the moment, but a lot of my rankings are for images (presume that means the images are appearing near the top in Google Images). How do I capitalise on that? It's not really much help to me that my images are popular unless it results in traffic to the pages where those images are used. I am running Wordpress so I have the option to have images embed as "no link", "link to attachment page", "link to original image", etc. Is there any advantage of using one of these over the other? I'd really like to set it up so that when a Google Images user clicks "View Image" it loads the attachment page or the host content page rather than the image. Bad SEO? I'm not sure if the fact that I'm using Jetpack Photon CDN image hosting will make this more complicated or not. Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Dropped from Google?
My website www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk appears to have been penalised by Google. I ranked fairly well for a number of venue related searches from my blog posts. Generally I'd find myself somewhere on page one or towards the top of page two. However recently I found I am nowhere to be seen for these venue searches. I still appear if I search for my name, business name and keywords in my domain name. A quick check of Yahoo and I found I am ranking very well, it is only Google who seem to have dropped me. I looked at Google webmaster tools and there are no messages or clues as to what has happened. However it does show my traffic dropping off a cliff edge on the 19th July from 850 impressions to around 60 to 70 per day. I haven't made any changes to my website recently and hadn't added any new content in July. I haven't added any new inbound links either, a search for inbound links does not show anything suspicious. Can anyone shed any light on why this might happen?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
Question on Moving Content
I just moved my site from a Wordpress hosted site to Squarespace. We have the same domain, however, the content is now located on a different URL (again, same base domain). I'm unable to easily set up 301 redirects for the old content to be mapped to the new content so I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations for a workaround. Basically, I want to make sure google knows that Product A's page is now located at this new URL. (www.domain.com/11245 > www.domain.com/product-a). Maybe it's something that I don't have to worry about anymore because the old content is gone? I mean, I have a global redirect set up that no matter what you enter after the base domain, it now goes to the homepage but I just want to make sure I'm not missing something here. Really appreciate your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheBatesMillStore1 -
Can a website be punished by panda if content scrapers have duplicated content?
I've noticed recently that a number of content scrapers are linking to one of our websites and have the duplicate content on their web pages. Can content scrapers affect the original website's ranking? I'm concerned that having duplicated content, even if hosted by scrapers, could be a bad signal to Google. What are the best ways to prevent this happening? I'd really appreciate any help as I can't find the answer online!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO0 -
Google plus
"Google+ members, and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google, will be able to search against both the broader web and their own Google+ social graph. That’s right; Google+ circles, photos, posts and more will be integrated into search in ways other social platforms can only dream about." What is meant by " and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google" ? Does it mean that non-google plus members won't be able to view Google+photos, posts ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050 -
"Original Content" Dynamic Hurting SEO? -- Strategies for Differentiating Template Websites for a Nationwide Local Business Segment?
The Problem I have a stable of clients spread around the U.S. in the maid service/cleaning industry -- each client is a franchisee, however their business is truly 'local' with a local service area, local phone/address, unique business name, and virtually complete control over their web presence (URL, site design, content; apart from a few branding guidelines). Over time I've developed a website template with a high lead conversion rate, and I've rolled this website out to 3 or 4 dozen clients. Each client has exclusivity in their region/metro area. Lately my white hat back linking strategies have not been yielding the results they were one year ago, including legitimate directories, customer blogging (as compelling as maid service/cleaning blogs can really be!), and some article writing. This is expected, or at least reflected in articles on SEO trends and directory/article strategies. I am writing this question because I see sites with seemingly much weaker back link profiles outranking my clients (using SEOMoz toolbar and Site Explorer stats, and factoring in general quality vs. quantity dynamics). Questions Assuming general on-page optimization and linking factors are equal: Might my clients be suffering because they're using my oft-repeated template website (albeit with some unique 'content' variables)? If I choose to differentiate each client's website, how much differentiation makes sense? Specifically: Even if primary content (copy, essentially) is differentiated, will Google still interpret the matching code structure as 'the same website'? Are images as important as copy in differentiating content? From an 'machine' or algorithm perspective evaluating unique content, I wonder if strategies will be effective such as saving the images in a different format, or altering them slightly in Photoshop, or using unique CSS selectors or slightly different table structures for each site (differentiating the code)? Considerations My understanding of Google's "duplicate content " dynamics is that they mainly apply to de-duping search results at a query specific level, and choosing which result to show from a pool of duplicate results. My clients' search terms most often contain client-specific city and state names. Despite the "original content" mantra, I believe my clients being local businesses who have opted to use a template website (an economical choice), still represent legitimate and relevant matches for their target user searches -- it is in this spirit I ask these questions, not to 'game' Google with malicious intent. In an ideal world my clients would all have their own unique website developed, but these are Main St business owners balancing solutions with economics and I'm trying to provide them with scalable solutions. Thank You! I am new to this community, thank you for any thoughts, discussion and comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | localizedseo0