Copying links from one Website to your own?

[waddsy]

As a typical strategic move I am creating a directory in my website (my website I sell art). So I am adding a "worldwide museum directory"

My web designer created a back end option for me to add , country, state/province, city and museum.. This is extemely tedious as there are thousands of museums.

I asked my web designer if it is possible to literally cut and paste someone elses directory into mine. He said it was not. Is he wrong? as adding city by city, state by state for the whole world is going to take a LONG time.

Can anyone help me with this? HUGEEE thanks in advance

P.S.
The reason im adding a directory is to create a deeper site supposively google likes this and also a good tool for people to come to my site and use hopefully resulting in more daily hits,, which google also supposively likes?

[cws3di]

Creating original content is time consuming and tedious. Many of the webmasters in this forum have spent their lives creating original content.

What you are suggesting is having your own webmaster go out and "cut and paste" someone else's directory into your own site. That is content theft, and covered by copyright laws.

I sincerely doubt you will find anyone here that will give you help to steal content.

[aimerlamer]

What you are suggesting is definitely possible. If the directory is structured a certain way so that you have to navigate to view different listings you may have to write an automated script or macro to collect the information. Google: data mining or macro If it is just one big long list then you just have to go to that page, view source and paste that HTML into the source of a page of your own. You may have to spend some time reformatting it, change the styling etc. Like the other author said, doing this is stealing content.

[petra]

I agree with cws3di. If you're too lazy to add your own original links, don't steal others' you can instead use the DMOZ dump.

[martinibuster]

That's content theft and if the moral implications don't bother you then perhaps the threat of a DMCA complaint to Google, MSN, Yahoo, your webhost, AND your domain name registrar might dissuade you.

Avoid shortcuts. They're the demise of many online ventures.

[waddsy]

I do realize what content theft is. However public information such as "bananas are yellow" "lemons are bitter" cannot be stolen. However styles, themes and original content that is not known to the general public is theft.

What I am attempting to do is just take a large content of common knowledge and place it into my site. If i were to do one link by one, taking museum by museum link and placing it into my site verses taking all one thousand of them and putting them into my site are simply going to give me the same results.
the only difference is the time alloted. potentially hundreds of hours lost. Now If the case of stealing is saving time then i should do link by link to make myself feel better that Im not stealing public information? im confused.

[cws3di]

Geez, that's like asking what is the difference between:

1. Each day this week, I walk into 7-11 and put an ice cream sandwich in my pocket. That takes an awful lot of time!

2. So, what I would really like to do is take a whole case of ice cream sandwiches out of the back store room. That would be a lot faster!

Don't you understand what Stealing is?

[martinibuster]

Publicly available information doesn't mean it is FREE to use in any way. What you are talking about is stealing and it will come with great risk to your web venture.

[waddsy]

OKay but a museum link is not stolen property, I can put it in my site as thousands of other sites have. I dont understand how this is content theft. People link to other peoples sites all the time. Now the way the other sites got the information is by museum directories or somewhere. Someone originally accumulated all of the data at sometime.

Im not trying to be argumentative I just done want people to think im "stealing" information when im not.

I have written many essays in my life as im sure you guys have and I have never stolen information and claimed as my own..

All you have to do if you are at my site is click the link and it will take it to the museums site. I believe that Im helping not hurting.

So stealing from a store i still cant relate to taking a link and placing it on my site.

I am currently and unfortunately doing link one by one and I dont plan to change otherwise unless I can come up with a faster way. That was the intention of this thread.

I am a moral person and dont intend to steal anything that is why im here asking for your advice!

[Beagle]

I am a moral person and dont intend to steal anything that is why im here asking for your advice!

And it seems you've gotten some consistent advice.

Individual facts aren't copyrightable, but compilations are. The person who made the directory spent all the hours you don't want to spend putting it together, so the law says he or she should get some benefit from that. As is often pointed out in this forum, copyright isn't the same thing as ownership; copyright law exists to give people a motivation to create something by giving them the right to decide how it gets used (which means they can let you use it if they want to).

[waddsy]

so how i have it,, adding city by city, state by state, museum by museum is okay? even though its pretty well the same information. Again I dont want to do anything illegal .. And creating a format of country>state>city>museum just makes common sense to me. Thats all the same directories do to. Im adding it one by one but in teh end it will look the same as everyone elses!

[neuron]

if the links you post are bare URLs, then you are not offering much. To provide something useful to your visitors you need to provide the appropriate anchor and descriptive text to compllment each link. If those descriptions are original work by someone else and you copy them, then you would be stealing their original content.

Yes, you are right in that you can use existing directories to provide you with a list of links, and that will save you a lot of time, but you'll need to come up with original descriptions for each of them on your own.

[waddsy]

understood. So if i just have a bare link which is all i have right now,, is it going to

1. Help create a deeper website resulting in a higher ranking (google) site?

2. attract people through keywords (museum directory) resulting in more hits resulting in a better ranked (google) site?

Finally, if i create content for each link which obviously will take literally a year.. how will this help the ranking, success of my website which is primarily to sell art?

[BigDave]

If there is any creativity in the ordering of the links on the page, or the ordering of the pages, then there is a good chance that the compilation is covered by copyright.

There is also a very good chance that you will be copying broken links on to your own site. Not a great plan.

As for your questions about Google, It might help, but there is also a very good chance that it will hurt your ranking.

To start with, you are going to have to link to all these pages off the pages you currently have. This will dilute the links that are there aleady, so it might decrease the ranking of your current pages.

Since this huge directory is not adding any real value (though it could if you were willing to actually put in some effort) it will not gain you any incoming links. Again, a dilution problem.

While most duplicate content just causes those particular pages to be filtered from the results, there is certainly some anecdotal evidence that there is some magic point, that if you pass that point, Google will remove the entire site from the results.

There is also the issue where sites that tend to go through a sudden growth spurt, and this sounds like extreme growth to me, get slammed in the results for at least several months. A consistant rate of growth seems to do much better.

And to finish off, let's look at google's webmaster guidelines

Make pages for users, not for search engines

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Yeah, there is a good chance that with all those additional pages, your site just might bet more traffic. But I suspect that you will get less of the traffic that you want, possibly having your art sales drop. People see lousy pages and hit the back button, they don't surf further.

[waddsy]

wow some extremely useful information.

Well the format of a directory is very hard not to be similar to others. I have all my countries state and cities in alphabetical order like other directories and the content is literally the same. ( I did check for dead links!). My reasoning for having a directory that is easy to use and not confusing is simply a tool for my viewers. This way hopefully when they need something they just come to my site (more hits).

I hope it doesnt kill my ranking as of course these are non reciprical links!

Lastly a question i have is ,, what is the pros/cons of having a link verses a link with a brief sentence-summary for example

New York- store of broomsticks

Verses

New York- store of broomsticks - a great place to buy broomsticks to clean your floor.

[aimerlamer]

The description is content. You want to create content to add value for your users and to create text relevancy for a greater number of keywords.

Generally speaking, the more subject relevant words you write on your links page the greater broad relevancy your links page will have to search engine queries.

For example, a page that says:
"Ant World - ant farms and stuff for ant hills" will be relevant to queries "ant world", "ant", "world", "ant hills", "ant farms", "ants" etc
as opposed to a page that only says: "Ant World" which will only be relevant to "ant" and "world" and "ant world"