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He basically is interested in Jobs, Cars and Houses (apartments, houses, lofts, etc).
He takes retrieves the information from 3 or 5 different websites for each of the three categories que is interested.
He then shows the information in listings and product pages where you can see exactly the same information in his website and in the websites where he retrieves the information from.
I�ve seen that, for example, BizRates, DealTime and other do exactly the same but with more categories (electronics, home, etc).
Isn�t this some kind of duplicate content? I mean, people cant post an ad in his website. He just gets the info from other sites that are well ranked in the SERP�s.
He created some kind of extra information like the average car price for a segment, car model, etc, with nice graphics, but i think this isn�t enough to make the website SEO Friendly without falling into the "duplicate content" flag.
What do you think? What could be a good idea here? How does bizrate and others do?
Thanks!
That is what I do, I display headline, link source and small 1 or 2 sentence intro for a news story. I collect from like 20 sites.
I do have a lot of *other* content on my web which is 100% original, but this news inclusion will hopefully give me traffic as people can read daily news (its parts to be exact) from single source.
This is outside US country.
Ways I *try* to differentiate my content is to have dynamic title, description and keywords made upon that short info. Otherwise it's totally duplicated, but I hope/think Google won't penalize me for this as its only a very short bit of info.
So according to a duplicate algorithm my specific news story page is around 15% the same as the source.
Source news article is probabbly 10 paragraphs long and I only use one.
My site is still in development phase and not yet launched, so can't really guarantee for results. I just presented my subjective thinking : )
I mean, your example is ok, but how does that answer my question?
But I'd suggest this:
- differentiate the job page as much as possible from original, include different meta tags for example
- add some extra unique content to the page, like a brief description of other jobs. Something as "maybe you would also be interested in.." and then add couple of headlines.
I believe this will benefit in the overall "uniqueness"
- there are great online tools that will calculate the similarity between web pages and potential dupe content, try them out and keep changing the page until you get a satisfactory (small) percentage of potential duplicate content
- change certain keywords, for example use "loidging" instead of others, if the original sources don't use them
- if you include pics, don't hotlink them. Have them dynamically saved to your server and change their names.
- perhaps adding a direct user input to the page? Like comments or something? I know it might not be applicable as you are dealing with job offers. But it can create authentic content
- as for bizrate, I noticed they include rel="nofollow" when they link to original content. I bet this is used because of potential duplicates. Not sure how it helps though, but maybe they want to prevent Google seeing directly from where they link :D Makes sense right?
- final advice: create original content that will rank high, and the linked stuff will naturally follow as a direct result of quality. As you mentioned, many sites do it and rank great ! This is not copy-pasting, this is providing user with good sources and easy navigation, it should not be penalized under any circumstances. But let's not forget that Googlebot is a robot : D
I think the best thing is to think what can i do with the content i have from other sites, like i said before, for example create average prices, and other statistic information useful for the users that is not available in the websites where the content comes from.
Does anyone know of other features i could add?
I also think that bizrate and other sites don´t get penalized because they provide some functionality to what they do.
A side note:
Bizrate has been around for quite a few years. They have develped a trust rank with Google, which can help overcome some of the duplicate content issues that a new site may face.
The Shopzilla sites, which includes Bizrate, were rank in the top 50 US web properties for April 2009.
[edited by: MadeWillis at 1:59 pm (utc) on May 22, 2009]
Having said that, no one (other than the SE's themselves) knows what mix and critical mass of duplicate content that will trip the algorithms duplicate content filter.
Having built several successful Internet companies, and having done battle with the SE algorithms since their inception, I'm of the mind that harvesting content from other sites for use on your own site only presents a duplicate content problem when you do not take the time to 'artfully' modify the content so that it is truly unique.
Bottom line, when using content from other sites you have to put in the 'work' and develop your own unique content. Given the vast amount of subject matter available on the Internet today, it is not unrealistic/unethical to use content from multiple sites to form your own unique content.
