Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?

[kdaniels]

Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated?

I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?

[RyanPurkey]

There are several examples of sites that do this which you can reference: Verge, Metafilter, HuffPo, BoingBoing, etc. but as far as allowable text goes, you'll want to look up fair use rules for wherever you're located, but here's the US and Wikipedia discussion of them.

http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Typically, you'll want to write some surrounding editorial content (unique) and of course link back to your source. If what you're doing is purely link based, popurls.com or alltop could be good examples.  Cheers!

[KaneJamison]

Ryan's resources look good regarding copyright & fair usage. If you're citing a paragraph or two and linking to the source, you're generally in the clear.

In terms of SEO, you'll want to be adding as much unique content to the page as you're citing if you plan on indexing the content. Here are examples of sites that do this curation approach well:

• http://swipefile.co/archives/
• http://further.net/archives/

If you're just going to pull the content in directly from an RSS feed, or if you're just adding a sentence plus the quoted text and a link, then you're probably not adding enough value for the content to be worth indexing. I'd set the meta robots tag to "noindex, follow" in this case.