Interesting comments on microformats thanks James. Best of luck with the site, it’s a great idea!

Thank you for your detailed thoughts. SEO is certainly an important factor that affects many types of sites but it’s also important to keep it in perspective. The impact of duplicate content is a real concern. However, it’s also just one component of an overall SEO strategy. As you said, coming up with original content for every wine that a site lists/features/represents, is often not practical when thousands of wines are involved. Being aware of the SEO implications of using syndicated wine descriptions/details is important but I believe choosing to use syndicated content appropriately while staying focused on SEO fundamentals is preferable to no content at all. In other words, it can be detrimental to fall into the trap of focusing too much on avoiding SEO penalties at the expense of sound SEO optimization and site design.

The web is evolving rapidly and although search engines are still incredibly popular tools, traffic is originating from an increasingly diverse set of sites. And often the traffic from these sites while not as high as natural search traffic has a higher probability to convert to a sale. For example, links to wine purchase pages originating from social graphs (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LBS feeds) carry with them the weight of a personal recommendation. As we know, the greatest catalyst for wine purchases are trusted recommendations. Having rich and detailed information on your pages can make the difference in converting the sale.

Lastly, looking forward, we may find that the use of semantic markup will help mitigate any negative impacts of using syndicated product details on e-commerce sites. (Just a theory of mine. I don’t have any evidence that this is or is not happening today). For example, using the hProduct or hListing microformats on e-commerce sites will allow site owners to indicate what content on their page represents, say, the product description. Search engines can then use this to know that the page is referring to a product for purchase and the description is not search engine spam. All of the major search engines are already indexing microformats so there are the additional benefits of getting your wine purchase pages listed correctly and on new commerce aggregation sites.

-James

However I work with small wine retailers and so the “duplicate content” issue raises it’s ugly head. For those who don’t know, this issue is about Google not wanting to show the same exact results on its search engine results page. It wants to give the user a variety of relevant and helpful links.

Note not all your traffic comes from Google’s organic (left side) search engine results. They come from regular visitors, referrals, Adwords, Maps, Yelp, foursquare, email marketing. There is no algorithmic penalty for using duplicate content with these traffic sources! Yourwineyourway defintely works for them, its just the SEO issue we’re worried about.

So back to organic SEO results for a wine retailer. It’s a tricky issue as discussed above by Ralph, Steve and James. They all have good points and, since I’ve been writing my own post on wine retailers using winery descriptions, here’s a draft version of my view.

If all you use is the winery description from yourwineyourway (or the winery website) then Google will regard this as duplicate content and it will rank poorly in organic search results (if at all).

Ideally you would have a completely unique description thereby avoiding the duplicate content issue. However being one of those people has tried to get wine products up on a website at 2am in the morning having ready made descriptions is a god send! So I truly appreciate what OwnIt is doing.

Here’s a middle path. Google won’t tell us how much of the duplicate content we need to change to make it seen as unique – and they never will as this will open them up to manipulation. So we’ve got to experiment and test how much unique content there needs to be.

Here’s what I recommend: use yourwineyourway data as an accurate description from the winery. But supplement it with your own review. This review may be “stimulated” by the winery’s description but it will not be the same. Hopefully you also have the time or resources to add experts reviews and customers add their own reviews – but if you’re a small business then probably not .

Just how unique it needs to be will be something I’ll do some experimentation with.

Thanks again guys!