I've seen this a lot, where websites will try to add value to their site in tons of industries, be it retail, real estate, medical and so on by taking two or more affiliate data feeds, mixing them together to add different sources of information on the same topic, on one page.
So you have a page about a certain house on your real estate web site and you decide to pull together feeds about the location, a weather feed, economics feed, realtor feeds and so on. You mash it all up on the page, but all the content is already available on other sites, you just put it all on one page.
Here, John Mueller of Google, is basically saying that is not really adding that much value. John said in a Google hangout this morning at the 43:48 mark
The one thing I would kind of caution against that I sometimes see is that people take an affiliate feed from one company and so oh, I will add value by crossing it with the affiliate feed from the other company. And basically, instead of having a web site that is just one affiliate feed, it’s like two affiliate feeds. And you are not really adding value, you are just like showing two affiliate feeds.
Here is the video embed:
Here is the full transcript:
QUESTION: We have an affiliate e-commerce site, we added related products to help things but we thought having product comparison information would be a benefit to the user and add value to the page. Do you agree and if so do we display the information in a table or how we best do it so that Google understands?ANSWER: In general you can do that in which ever way you want.
So that is not something where IU’d say you need to do in this specific HTML format for Google to understand that. If you are providing additional information on your pages then that is something we can usually pick up. So it is not something that you need to do in any special HTML format.
The one thing I would kind of caution against that I sometimes see is that people take an affiliate feed from one company and so oh, I will add value by crossing it with the affiliate feed from the other company. And basically, instead of having a web site that is just one affiliate feed, it’s like two affiliate feeds. And you are not really adding value, you are just like showing two affiliate feeds.
So really, making sure that you are doing more than just republishing other site’s content in whatever way that makes sense for your users that is kind of what I would aim for there.
Forum discussion at YouTube.
