What are your views on recent statements regarding "advertorial" content?
-
Hi,
Recently, there's been a lot said and written about how Google is going to come down hard on 'advertorial' content.
Many B2B publishers provide exposure to their clients by creating and publishing content about them -----based on information/ content obtained from clients (for example, in the form of press releases) or compiled by the publisher. From a target audience/ user perspective, this is useful information that the publication is bringing to its audience. Also, let's say the publishers don't link directly to client websites.
In such a case, how do you think Google is likely to look at publisher websites in the context of the recent statements related to 'advertorial' type content?
Look forward to views of the Moz community.
Thanks,
Manoj
-
Thanks, Matt.
Yes, this issue with advertorial content is two-fold
a) With links and flow of PageRank --- which I suppose is more straightforward and a no-no. However, what's the likely impact on services such as PRWEb, PRLeap etc.?
b) Content that may have been generated and published as a result of commercial arrangement between two parties, but without any links and flow of PageRank. Need to consider this in the context of a supposedly a better understanding and reliance on entities-associations for ranking purposes.
-
Hi Manoj,
You have to be really careful here, Matt Cutts came out and said:
“If a link in a paid post would affect search engines, that link should not pass PageRank (e.g. by using the nofollow attribute).”
If you're paying for an article to be placed then make sure that you nofollow the link because, like with the big InterFlora case, you will get punished.
Matt
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
-
Question regarding subdomains and duplicate content
Hey everyone, I have another question regarding duplicate content. We are planning on launching a new sector in our industry to satisfy a niche. Our main site works as a directory with listings with NAP. The new sector that we are launching will be taking all of the content on the main site and duplicating it on a subdomain for the new sector. We still want the subdomain to rank organically, but I'm having struggles between putting a rel=canonical back to main site, or doing a self-referencing canonical, but now I have duplicates. The other idea is to rewrite the content on each listing so that the menu items are still the same, but the listing description is different. Do you think this would be enough differentiating content that it won't be seen as a duplicate? Obviously make this to be part of the main site is the best option, but we can't do that unfortunately. Last question, what are the advantages or disadvantages of doing a subdomain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
How do I optimize pages for content that changes everyday?
Hi Guys I run daily and weekend horoscopes on my site, the daily horoscopes are changing every day for obvious reasons, and the weekend horoscopes change every weekend. However, I'm stuck in how the pages need to be structured. I also don't know how I should go about creating title tags and meta tags for content that changes daily. Each daily and weekend entry creates a new page. As you can see here http://bit.ly/1FV6x0y you can see todays horoscope. Since our weekend horoscopes cover Friday Sat and Sunday, there is no daily for Friday, so it shows duplicate pages across Friday, Sat and sunday. If you click on today, tomorrow and weekend all pages showing are duplicate and this will happen for each star sign from Fri, Sat Sun. My question is, will I be penalized doing this? Even if the content changes? How can I optimize the Title Tags and Meta Tags for pages that are constantly changing? I'm really stuck on this one and would appreciate some feedback into this tricky beast. Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Does Duplicate Content Actually "Penalize" a Domain?
Hi all, Some co-workers and myself were in a conversation this afternoon regarding if duplicate content actually causes a penalty on your domain. Reference: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-duplicate-content-wont-hurt-you-unless-it-is-spammy-167459 Both sources from Google do not say "duplicate content causes a penalty." However, they do allude to spammy content negatively affecting a website. Why it came up: We originally were talking about syndicated content (same content across multiple domains; ex: "5 explanations of bad breath") for the purpose of social media sharing. Imagine if dentists across the nation had access to this piece of content (5 explanations of bad breath) simply for engagement with their audience. They would use this to post on social media & to talk about in the office. But they would not want to rank for that piece of duplicated content. This type of duplicated content would be valuable to dentists in different cities that need engagement with their audience or simply need the content. This is all hypothetical but serious at the same time. I would love some feedback & sourced information / case studies. Is duplicated content actually penalized or will that piece of content just not rank? (feel free to reference that example article as a real world example). **When I say penalized, I mean "the domain is given a negative penalty for showing up in SERPS" - therefore, the website would not rank for "dentists in san francisco, ca". That is my definition of penalty (feel free to correct if you disagree). Thanks all & look forward to a fun, resourceful conversation on duplicate content for the other purposes outside of SEO. Cole
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
How cloudflare might affect "rank juice" on numerous domains due to limited IP range?
We have implemented quite a few large websites onto cloudflare and have been very happy with our results. Since this has been successful so far, we have been considering putting some other companies on CL as well, but have some concerns due to the structure of their business and related websites. The companies run multiple networks of technology, review, news, and informational websites. All have good content (Almost all unique to each website) and rankings currently, but if implemented to cloudflare, would be sharing DNS and most likely IP's with eachother. Raising a concern of google reducing their link juice because it would be detected as if it was coming from the same server, such as people used to do for their blog farms. For example, they might be tasked to write an article on XYZ company's new product. A unique article would be generated for 5-10 websites, all with unique, informative, valid and relevant content to each domain; Including links, be it direct or contextual, to the XYZ product or website URL. To clarify, so there is no confusion...each article is relevant to its website... technology website- artciel about the engineering of xyz product
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MNoisy
business website - How xyz product is affecting the market or stock price
howto website - How the xyz product is properly used Currently all sites are on different IP's and servers due to their size, but if routed through cloudflare, will Google simply detect this as duplicate linking efforts or some type of "black hat" effort since its coming from cloudflare? If yes, is there a way to prevent this while still using CL?
If no, why and how is this different than someone doing this to trick google? Thank you in advance! I look forward to some informative answers.0 -
Publishing the same article content on Yahoo? Worth It? Penalties? Urgent
Hey All, I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions. Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | moneywise_test0 -
DIV Attribute containing full DIV content
Hi all I recently watched the latest Mozinar called "Making Your Site Audits More Actionable". It was presented by the guys at seogadget. In the mozinar one of the guys said he loves the website www.sportsbikeshop.co.uk and that they have spent a lot of money on it from an SEO point of view (presumably with seogadget) so I decided to look through the source and noticed something I had not seen before and wondered if anyone can shed any light. On this page (http://www.sportsbikeshop.co.uk/motorcycle_parts/content_cat/852/(2;product_rating;DESC;0-0;all;92)/page_1/max_20) there is a paragraph of text that begins with 'The ever reliable UK weather...' and when you via the source of the containing DIV you will notice a bespoke attribute called "threedots=" and within it, is the entire text content for that DIV. Any thoughts as to why they would put that there? I can't see any reason as to why this would benefit a site in any shape or form. Its invalid markup for one. Am I missing a trick..? Thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Kris P.S. for those who can't be bothered to visit the site, here is a smaller version of what they have done: This is an introductory paragraph of text for this page.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yousayjump0 -
Merging four sites into one... Best way to combine content?
First of all, thank you in advance for taking the time to look at this. The law firm I work for once took a "more is better" approach and had multiple websites, with keyword rich domains. We are a family law firm, but we have a specific site for "Arizona Child Custody" as one example. We have four sites. All four of our sites rank well, although I don't know why. Only one site is in my control, the other three are managed by FindLaw. I have no idea why the FindLaw sites do well, other than being in the FindLaw directory. They have terrible spammy page titles, and using Copyscape, I realize that most of the content that FindLaw provides for it's attorneys are "spun articles." So I have a major task and I don't know how to begin. First of all, since all four sites rank well for all of the desired phrases-- will combining all of that power into one site rocket us to stardom? The sites all rank very well now, even though they are all technically terrible. Literally. I would hope that if I redirect the child custody site (as one example) to the child custody overview page on the final merged site, we would still maintain our current SERP for "arizona child custody lawyer." I have strongly encouraged my boss to merge our sites for many reasons. One of those being that it's playing havoc with our local places. On the other hand, if I take down the child custody site, redirect it, and we lose that ranking, I might be out of a job. Finally, that brings me down to my last question. As I mentioned, the child custody site is "done" very poorly. Should I actually keep the spun content and redirect each and every page to a duplicate on our "final" domain, or should I redirect each page to a better article? This is the part that I fear the most. I am considering subdomains. Like, redirecting the child custody site to childcustody.ourdomain.com-- I know, for a fact, that will work flawlessly. I've done that many times for other clients that have multiple domains. However, we have seven areas of practice and we don't have 7 nice sites. So child custody would be the only legal practice area that has it's own subdomain. Also, I wouldn't really be doing anything then, would I? We all know 301 redirects work. What I want is to harness all of this individual power to one mega-site. Between the four sites, I have 800 pages of content. I need to formulate a plan of action now, and then begin acting on it. I don't want to make the decision alone. Anybody care to chime in? Thank you in advance for your help. I really appreciate the time it took you to read this.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SDSLaw0 -
What does Youtube Consider Duplicate content and will it effect my ranking/traffic?
What does youtube consider duplicated content? If I have a power point type video that I already have on youtube and I want to change the beginning and end call to action, would that be considered duplicate content? If yes then how would this effect my ranking/youtube page. Will it make a difference if I have it embedded on my blog?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | christinarule0
