How to Not Scrap Content, but still Being a Hub

[nwright]

Hello Seomoz members. I'm relatively new to SEO, so please forgive me if my questions are a little basic.

One of the sites I manage is GoldSilver.com. We sell gold and silver coins and bars, but we also have a very important news aspect to our site.

For about 2-3 years now we have been a major hub as a gold and silver news aggregator. At 1.5 years ago (before we knew much about SEO), we switched from linking to the original news site to scraping their content and putting it on our site. The chief reason for this was users would click outbound to read an article, see an ad for a competitor, then buy elsewhere. We were trying to avoid this (a relatively stupid decision with hindsight).

We have realized that the Search Engines are penalizing us, which I don't blame them for, for having this scraped content on our site.

So I'm trying to figure out how to move forward from here. We would like to remain a hub for news related to Gold and Silver and not be penalized by SEs, but we also need to sell bullion and would like to avoid loosing clients to competitors through ads on the news articles.

One of the solutions we are thinking about is perhaps using an iFrame to display the original url, but within our experience. An example is how trap.it does this (see attached picture). This way we can still control the experience some what, but are still remaining a hub.

Thoughts?

Thank you,

nick

3dLVv

[AlanBleiweiss]

I honestly can't offer any short term suggestions. It's a big challenge to know what the best short term path is.  Ultimately, you'll need to remove all the scraped content.  Do that without replacing it and in the short term, you won't see any gains, though you may even see some short term losses as it's possible you're not being purely penalized.

[nwright]

Alan,

Thank you for your thoughts. I agree we need to change our strategy and move away from scraped content. Any technical work arounds we try to do (like iFrame) may work now, but ultimately we seem to just be delaying the inevitable.

Since that strategy will take a while to implement, what would you recommend for the shorter term?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Nick,

You're in a difficult situation, to say the least.  iFrames were a safe bet a couple years ago, however Google has gotten better and better at discovering content contained in previously safe environments within the code. And they're just going to get better at it over time.

The only truly safe solution for a long term view is to change strategy drastically.  Find quality news elsewhere, and have content writers create unique articles built on the core information contained in those.  Become your own news site with a unique voice.

The expense is significant given you'll need full time writers, however with a couple entry level writers right out of college, or just a year or two into the content writing / journalism path, you've got a relatively low cost of entry.  The key is picking really good talent.

I was able to replace an entire team of 12 poorly chosen writers with 3 very good writers, for example.

The other reality with that is needing to lose all the scraped content. It's got to go.  You can't salvage it, or back-date newly written content around it, not in the volume you're dealing with.  So you're going to have to earn ranking all over again, but through real, value added reasons.