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.
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
-
Crawl Stats Decline After Site Launch (Pages Crawled Per Day, KB Downloaded Per Day)
Hi all, I have been looking into this for about a month and haven't been able to figure out what is going on with this situation. We recently did a website re-design and moved from a separate mobile site to responsive. After the launch, I immediately noticed a decline in pages crawled per day and KB downloaded per day in the crawl stats. I expected the opposite to happen as I figured Google would be crawling more pages for a while to figure out the new site. There was also an increase in time spent downloading a page. This has went back down but the pages crawled has never went back up. Some notes about the re-design: URLs did not change Mobile URLs were redirected Images were moved from a subdomain (images.sitename.com) to Amazon S3 Had an immediate decline in both organic and paid traffic (roughly 20-30% for each channel) I have not been able to find any glaring issues in search console as indexation looks good, no spike in 404s, or mobile usability issues. Just wondering if anyone has an idea or insight into what caused the drop in pages crawled? Here is the robots.txt and attaching a photo of the crawl stats. User-agent: ShopWiki Disallow: / User-agent: deepcrawl Disallow: / User-agent: Speedy Disallow: / User-agent: SLI_Systems_Indexer Disallow: / User-agent: Yandex Disallow: / User-agent: MJ12bot Disallow: / User-agent: BrightEdge Crawler/1.0 (crawler@brightedge.com) Disallow: / User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 5 Disallow: /cart/ Disallow: /compare/ ```[fSAOL0](https://ibb.co/fSAOL0)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BandG0 -
Site structure for location + services pages
We are in the process of restructuring our site and are trying to figure out Google's preference for location pages and services. Let's say we are an auto repair company with lots of locations and each one of them offer some unique services, while other services are offered by all or most other locations. Should we have a global page for each service live with a link to the location page for each shop that offers that service? OR Should we built a unique page about each service for every location as a subfolder of each location (essentially creating a LOT of sub pages because each location has 15-20 services. Which will rank better?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens1 -
Should I just redirect all my sites to my main site.
Hi, Over the last few years I have built many sites and own a lot of domain names. Some have high page rank some have high domain authority and some have many back links. I'm finding it very difficult to keep up with all the links and being able to provide quality content for everything. Should I just redirect everything to my one site that make the most money as all sites are for the same industry, but in different categories of that industry. So I could 301 redirect all the sites to the relevant page on my money site. Would it be a problem is 1000's if not 10,000's of links all of a sudden pointed in to one site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cibble030 -
Moving career site to new URL from main site. Will it hurt SEO for main page?
For one of our clients we are building a career site and putting it under a different URL and hosting service (mainly due to security concerns of hosting it under the same host and domain). almost 100% of the incoming traffic to their current career section (which it is in a sub-folder) receives traffic for branded keywords (brand + job/career/employment), that is, there are no job position specific keywords. The client is now worried that after moving the site, the inbound traffic to the main site will be severely affected as well as the SERP results. My questions are, will the non-career related SERPs be affected? I don't see how will they be but I could be wrong If no, how could we reassure her that the SEO to the main site wont be affected? are there any case studies of a similar case (splitting part of the website under a new URL and hosting service?) Thank you for your help. PS: this is my first post so please forgive me if this has been asked before. I could not find a good response.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rflores0 -
De-indexing product "quick view" pages
Hi there, The e-commerce website I am working on seems to index all of the "quick view" pages (which normally occur as iframes on the category page) as their own unique pages, creating thousands of duplicate pages / overly-dynamic URLs. Each indexed "quick view" page has the following URL structure: www.mydomain.com/catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodId=89514&catgId=cat140142&KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=475&width=700 where the only thing that changes is the product ID and category number. Would using "disallow" in Robots.txt be the best way to de-indexing all of these URLs? If so, could someone help me identify how to best structure this disallow statement? Would it be: Disallow: /catalog/includes/inc_productquickview.jsp?prodID=* Thanks for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FPD_NYC0 -
Rich snippets showing on some pages but not others
Hi, I have rich snippet mark up showing in serps for some pages but not others. All pages test fine using Googles structured data testing tool. Whats really annoying is that they seem to appear for some pages but not others within the same directory / page format. None of googles troubleshooting suggestions on the issue are a problem i.e. Does your markup follow our usage guidelines? Is your marked-up content hidden from users? Is your markup incorrect or misleading? Is your marked-up content representative of the main content of the page? Have you supplied enough information? Have you only recently updated your content? Does your markup include incorrect nesting? Reviews: Does your review use count instead of vote? There are alot of instances when the same mark up is used twice e.g. on product x page in one directory and on product x page in a different directory (theres no dupe content). I wondered if that could be a reason but there are alot of instances when product x in directory a has the snippet when it doesnt in directory b. There doesnt seem to be an identifiable pattern as to why one page whould show the snippet and not another. Any feedback appreciated. Happy to pm example pages. Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyMacLean0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Alexa site title shows as "302 Found" on search result pages
If you search for the site "ixl.com" in Alexa, for some reason, it's showing the site as "302 Found" instead of showing the website name, IXL. If you drill into that, it shows the site as ixl.com, but underneath that, it says "302 Found" again. Every other site I search for seems to show the site's name properly. I have no idea where it's getting this "302 Found" from. Does anyone know how to fix this? Here's a link directly to the search results page: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=ixl.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | john4math0