Is it ok to add snippet of information taken from other sites on product pages?

[fablau]

Hello here,

I own an e-commerce website that sells digital sheet music, and I would like to enrich my product pages with short references to artists/composers related to the product, taken from external websites such as mentions, fresh news, information taken from related videos, cross-references, etc. In other words, I'd like to provide our users with a different kind of informational content that our competitors are currently not offering. We could also think of this like "providing some sort of aggregate content on product pages to enrich the user's experience by providing more information about the product".

What do you think are the risks or the benefits of such an approach? And if there are any risks, how to avoid/tackle them?

Any thoughts are very welcome!

Thank you in advance to anyone.

[TheeDigital]

Fabrizio,

Obviously it would be a concern if another company thought you were stealing their content and infringing upon it, without at least a link back, so you might want to reach out to those companies before you post any of their content.

My suggestion would be to look at what, GDGT.com is doing it sounds like what you want to do is what they're doing in the electronic space.

[toddmumford]

Fabrizo,

You will want to ensure that there is an adequate amount of editorial, unique content driving each of those pages on your website. Aggregating content is great, but Google really wants to see your personal interpretation / review / opinion on that set of information, so think about ways in which you can potentially generate unique 200 word "final thoughts' or reviews / editorials on each product internally.

[fablau]

Thank you Richard for your reply.

Yes, of course, any mention or aggregated contents will have a clear reference to the source, no doubts on that. Links to the source will allow users, if interested, to learn more about the subject.

As for your suggested gdgt.com, I see on their product pages editorial reviews, no really references on eternal sites as I have suggested here.... am I missing something?

Thank you again for your thoughts.

[fablau]

Thank you Todd. Yes, that's of course our first plan of action: writing custom and unique editorial reviews together with user reviews, and we are doing that (slowly), but if that were my only plan, it would take years to have custom reviews with references for each of our product pages (we have thousands of product pages), so my idea was really to offer our users more info and references to extend their knowledge on each product in a more "automatic/algorithmic" way, so that we can offer such a "fresh" and interesting content faster... think of this, for example, if the product is the Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, I could:

1. Add references to related videos.

2. Add references and info taken from famous articles on this famous piece

3. Add news related to this composition (latest recordings, performances, etc).

4. Teaching material, etc.

And of course allow users to comment and discuss on each of the above.

That's the basic idea. My real concern here is if, by doing all this, Google could penalize me to "aggregate" partial text taken from other websites (aka: "content duplication").

Thank you!

[toddmumford]

Hi Fabrizo,

This makes sense.

If this is the case, I would focus on using as much meta data as possible, and not text in the form of sentence and paragraph structure from other websites. Let the user comments and reviews, for now, form the bulk of written text, and then when you can add your unique text this will help.

This way the percentage of duplicate text in the form of sentence structure is reduced. It's not a permanent fix, but might help in the meantime as you build those unique write ups.

You see this concept in product specification sites, and in real estate meta data listings.

Hope this helps,
Todd

[fablau]

Yes, I agree with you Todd, thank you for your reply!