Forum Moderators: not2easy
I'm about to setup a classifieds site.
It came with a very short list of categories. I was thinking to base my categories catalog pretty much like ebay's categories, plus some "personals" and "announcements" categories that ebay doesn't have.
Could I have a legal problem for doing so?
For example, Yellow Pages do not have copyright on the contents of their directories - the names and addresses. However, the do own copyright of the category structure of such.
This is the same with probably most directory type sites. To be safe, have a look around the publication, whether it be print or online and see if there is any copyright information.
Good luck.
I guess that if I copy-paste it at 100%, I could have problems.
I mean, any classifieds site "contains" at least 20-30 of the ebays categories, this is because, obviously this are generic agrupations of items and if good common sense is applied in the categorization it could be easy to end up with very similar content anyway.
So, how much this catalog needed to be changed in order to dont be considered a copy!?
I shut down 12 copycats last year, so beware and do your own work.
I'll have 2 persons to manually check and narrow the 25 thousands ebay's categories and merging them with other 3-4 big catalogs for certain categories and including many others that don't apply to ebay but to newspapers ads.
So, the question is how much "similar" is a "copy"?
you might have bigger problems. How are you going to fill those with ads before Google penalizes you for dupe content? I assume you'll use one or a few template and change the meta and a few words. Can't do much more with 25,000 directories...
Some people insert "poison pills" in their text, like I do, and then scan the search engines monthly to see who has swallowed that pill. What looks like a category name to you might be a 100% unique phrase as far as google/yahoo/msn are concerned.
And it is not even only 'poison pills'. There are also other 'pills' - YP salesperson goes in to sell an ad.
Advertiser sells left handed, right threaded, purple widgets.
Salesperson says you need an ad in Widgets, Left Handed Widgets, Purple widgets, and right threaded widgets.
Advertiser says - I also need an ad in Left Handed, Right Threaded Purple Widgets.
Salespersons says we don't have that categrory.
Advertiser says well I don't want to advertise.
Salesperson says "Do you do those in Yellow as well?" - Looks like we have a new category.
(BTW, When I said "narrowing" the categories. I meant making it smaller, fewer categories, may be a 1/4.)
So, unless google penalization algo is a bunch of outsourced persons manually reviewing for sites that looks similar, how can google penalize a site for a such a minimum duplication ...?
I say minimum, because, common, how much is the categories content size respecting the full content of a site like this?
Typical classifieds sites using an "out of the box" instalations keeping all of them basic settings and almost identical categories would be vanished from google's earth. But hey, you know, they are not, so, how is that?
I say facts, because for this work, I've been collecting about ~400 classifieds resources (sites, software, class affiliates, etc) among I found and grouped them when I found some using the same classifieds software, and believe me, many kept the basic categories.
So, please, explain how the dupe content penalization works for these cases.
the number of posts has nothing to do with knowledge, but thanks. The dupe penalty will come from your own pages, if it ever comes. Having a lot of empty categories (high similarity between them since there's no listings) can do that IMO. That's what I meant, not Google penalizing someone for taking ebay's category name.
all that said: it's an opinion, not a fact
A short consultation with a copyright lawyer might be a good idea, though.
