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Sneaky Mis-spellings

Tuesday, 17 April 2007

Love Honey have recently added themselves to the books of Affiliate Future.

Go to Love Honey (warning: adult content) and at the bottom you'll find a link called Adult Sex Toys.
 
That links to a page with mis-spellings.

I say a page, I mean a directory of mis-spellings.

There are pages upon pages of mis-spellings which Google has allocated PageRank values of around 4 on each.

I applaud Love Honey for doing this. Fair play, if they didn't someone else would. But surely if anyone else did this, Google would come down on them like a tonne of bricks?

That also leads to another question. When using data feeds, who gets penalised for the duplicate content? The merchants who wrote the copy or the affiliates who reproduce it?

Ever get the feeling of them and us?

Quite an apt video! Cam's Breast Exam

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QualityNonsense

>When using data feeds, who gets penalised for the duplicate content?

Assuming search engines have indexed the merchant site first, it'd seem to fair to assume it'd be the affiliate site that gets penalised.

However, if the merchant site has few inbound links or ranks poorly for other reasons, it's not impossible for affiliate sites to be seen as the canonical version of the content by search engines.

I tested this with a Wordpress blog with unique, fresh content. I syndicated the RSS feed to 100 or so blog aggregators.

Within a short period, Google ranked the aggregators above for many terms, even on searches for the URL.

Written on Tuesday 17 April 2007 at 23:14:16 GMT (Permalink)

Richard LoveHoney

Very observant David! The mis-spellings were originally added to LoveHoney to help in on-site search - "No products found for vibator / dido / codom" is pretty lame.

So we researched a load of typos and added them to help on-site search.

Then we thought "If people typo on LoveHoney, then they typo on search engines, too, so let's make our typos crawlable and see what happens."

What happens is we get a lot of visitors for "plyboy" and "schoolgril"

LOL. Does it convert? That's our secret ;-)

There is no difference between allowing Google to crawl actual search results pages (whether they're typos or correct spellings), and allowing Google to crawl store pages which are, effectively, search pages.

A lot of them end up being duplicate pages, which I guess is how you relate this to the duplicate content issue for data feeds...

But it's important to understand how Google reacts to duplicate content - it doesn't "penalise" as such.

If it finds two (or more) pages which it thinks are "substantially similar", it decides to show just one of them in the SERPS.

I don't know exactly how it does that, but it will make some judgement as to what the original source of the content is... which I should imagine would be the merchant in most cases.

It raises a question about what the datafeed is for - from a merchant's point of view, they're providing a feed to help you monetise your existing traffic by making it easy for you to show your visitors lots of regularly updated, categorised products.

From your point of view, you want to also use the feed to rank well on Google to generate more traffic.

Seeing as it's the same content that's already available on another site, I can't see how you can object if your duplication of the content doesn't get shown in the SERPS...

I don't understand about your "them and us" comment. Are you suggesting that Google has indexed LoveHoney's typos pages and ranks them well, when it wouldn't if the same pages were on an affiliate site?

I don't think that argument would stand up to any scrutiny. For a start, other than the visible page rank of the LoveHoney pages (which itself is an increasingly unreliable indicator), how do you know that our typo pages rank well for typo searches?

Sorry, I seem to have gone on a bit!

Have you joined our programme? I hope so!

Written on Thursday 19 April 2007 at 14:57:24 GMT (Permalink)

David

Thanks for your comments Richard.

Regarding "them and us", there seems to be a few merchants who do one thing yet preach another.

For example, they try to encourage sales yet restrict their product feed.

I presume that because x thousands of pages link to Love Honey's, the mis-spellings work. Chances are if I created a page of them, I wouldn't do so well. Hoever, I'll never know if I don't try so perhaps that's a future project... :-)

Written on Thursday 19 April 2007 at 15:16:05 GMT (Permalink)