Ranking sites in vertical markets with 90% scraped content

[edthomasnp]

Hi,

Hoping to get advice about ranking sites (a vertical market search engine/portal like a car site for example) that gets its content from scraping car sites.

For various reasons (mostly scale eg cant get car dealers to push their listings to us) content was scraped.

The startup has received great press, TV interviews, incubator programs etc, and has also secured very significant investment. I feel if this site was launched pre-panda it would be ranking much better.

We have invested significantly in our tech, our search tools and site innovation place us easily as market leader in this space.

Anyone with experience in ranking sites with legitimate reasons for using scraped content?

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

I have, I've worked at such a company where we scraped details on training courses and were an aggregator ourselves. It's really possible to rank better than the original pages as long as you create great overviews of data and extra content next to the scraped data. Let me know if you want me to answer any more specific questions.

[edthomasnp]

Thanks.

The problem is I have say 200 000 listings. How do I add "extra content" to that many pages? It has to be in the form of computer/algorithm/formulaic generated content like charts etc. Then i wonder if google can even read it.

[TheeDigital]

Look at how a lot of squidoo lenses operate, they may have 0 or only a couple paragraphs of unique content, but by pulling in feeds from other sources suddenly you have maps, blog posts, images, videos, etc and are a somewhat unique source.  Another thing to consider might be to pull in the scraped content with an iframe and make sure you have enough unique on the page to still be able to rank.