How to Not Scrap Content, but still Being a Hub
-
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
-
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.
-
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?
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html another example Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/ same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one??? thanks very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ydf0 -
Whay are low-quality exact match domains still ranking well for our biggest term?
There are a number of low-quality “exact-match” domains that are ranking well for the term “locum tenens”. I don’t want to specifically mention any sites, but there are some with poor content and very few quality backlinks that are on page one. The only reason I can see for them ranking so well is the fact that “locum” and/or “tenens” are in the URL. It’s very frustrating because we have worked hard to do all the right things (regular blogging, high-quality content, quality backlinks, etc.) to build our domain authority and page authority so they are better than these sites, yet they still out-rank us. Our site is www.bartonassociates.com. Could it have something to do with the term “locum tenens”, which is a latin phrase? Is it possible that because it is a latin term that it somehow slipped through the cracks and avoided the update that was supposed to eliminate this? If so, what can we do to get some justice?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ba_seomoz0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Is it a duplicate content ?
Hi Please check this link : http : // www . speedguide . net/news/yahoo-acquires-email-management-app-xobni-5252 it's a post where the admin just write the first 200-300 words and then insert the "read more here" which links to the original post This make the website active as the admin always add new content but is this not against google rules as it's a duplicate content ?? Can you tell me the name of this strategy ? Is this really work to make the website active ??
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | loumi0 -
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
If I redirect a penalized domain to a non-penalized domain, will the new domain still be penalized?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MangoMan160