Your opinions re nSphere.net and Bloomreach.com

[WizardOfMoz]

What nSphere does is they create pages on a subdomain of your existing domain

local.example.com

they create static pages (product listing) targeting specific searches of specific locations.

local.example.com/air-jordans-in-san-francisco-california.htm
local.example.com/nokia-lumia-products-in-chicago-illinois.htm
etc.

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What Bloomreach does is they create static pages (product listing) on a subfolder of your existing domain

example.com/th/nokia-lumia.htm
example.com/th/white-samsung-galaxy-s3.htm
etc.

basically they create pages that they think is similar to what the site is offering.

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Do you think the pages created by them will cause our site to be penalized in the long run for having too many thin static pages? From my undestanding Google Panda penalizes poor quality pages and I appreciate your opinion guys if what their doing will eventually do harm to our site.

Maybe there are members here who have actually used their service who can testify if bloomreach or sphere is worth the investment/risk.

Thanks!

[AshuGarg]

BloomReach's technology has been live on websites since August of 2009. The goal of our product is to create a limited number of new high quality pages that are well liked by users, have a compelling user experience and drive increased purchases on our customers sites.

To do this, we use web-wide and site data to identify and predict demand that the website should get, but isn't. We then evaluate the relevance of a customers products/content for this demand as expressed by a theme/query. We only create a page if that relevance is very high and there is no existing competitive or duplicative page. We QA these pages and then monitor the quality of these pages over time. For example, we will identify if these pages become more duplicative (using our DDR technology recently covered by Search Engine Land) over time due to product inventory changes or if users are not liking these pages as measured by metrics like bounce rate. If a page does not do well on some of these quality and user happiness dimensions then we will add a noindex tag to those pages.

The net result is that BloomReach pages tend to perform equally or better than a customers existing "category-like" pages. These existing pages tend to be automatically created based on a defined ontology database and faceted search technologies. Other than a limited number of high profile pages, which are manually reviewed, these pages do not have any technology that is constantly analyzing the quality or user experience metrics of these pages and making constant changes to improve their quality.  BloomReach pages do this and that is why over time we tend to see BloomReach pages perform better than the comparable pages on the site for metrics like bounce rate.

We'd be happy to answer any follow up questions and share with you what we've seen on the 90+ sites on which we are currently deployed.  If interested, please email ashutosh@bloomreach.com.

[AdamThompson]

Based on the info you've shared, I would avoid them both. Sounds like a service that is very likely to get your site penalized - if not now, in the future.