The SEO Blackhole in Deal Aggregators and Price Comparison Portals
We’ve seen comparison and aggregation sites that are built on content and getting most of their users from search engine traffic. This guide is meant to help you do the best you can in search engines.
Looking at comparison sites/aggregators, and also Google’s content guidelines, it is very important for these sites to think about long-term rather than fixing things in short-term. So for these sites, the best way is to choose between
When most of the aggregators go with the first option because it is pretty easy compared to a content driven approach, here is the catch. You can be lucky with the first approach as far as your results are hidden behind the bush for the first few years. But when you grow, your website will gather the attention of Google and the chances of your content reported as low quality gets higher.
Google Panda Algorithm — What the heck is that?
“Panda is a series of updates to the Google search algorithm designed to distinguish high quality sites from low quality ones, with the ultimate goal of providing the user with the most relevant and useful content. Simply: if an affiliate doesn’t add value to their site beyond what the supplier provides, they could see a negative effect to their page ranking through Panda’s criteria.” — source: SearchEngineWatch
When both affiliates and aggregators use supplier content, they are not providing useful content beyond what the supplier provides. Here is an excellent article by Search Engine Watch to help you understand the seriousness of the problem: https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2131610/google-panda-affiliate-sites-cope
In layman terms, search engines thinks it is not worthy to store the same information in two different places. From a Google’s perspective, an extra copy does not add any valuable information to search users, it’s just another blob of text to index and store (or, in many cases, to ignore). It simply doesn’t matter whether you are a comparison site, aggregator or an affiliate, Google gives no consideration for your pages as long as your content is copied from other sites, even if it is from an authorized supplier site. You won’t be penalized for copyright violations but that doesn’t mean your pages get better ranks in search indexes.
Here is the key takeaway, otherwise
Less duplicated content
(or)
More original content
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Originally published at adzis.com on April 17, 2018.
