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? Common Content and Copyleft are two projects that aim to help the
free flow of information by allowing people to reuse various registered
content. Yahoo! created a free Creative Commons search.
? Content from prior to 1923 should usually be usable. Material from
1923 to 1963 may be usable depending on whether or not it was
copyrighted, published with a copyright notice, and whether or not the
copyright was renewed.
? The U.S. Government has a bunch of free copy on a variety of topics.
When in doubt, check with Copyright.gov or your local laws. A variety
of government resources are referenced at the end of the chapter.
Integrating Consumer Generated Media
It can seem a bit hard to optimize pages that consist of content created by others,
but there can be some blessings in letting others add content to your site.
? Spelling errors become more acceptable. If some of your users
misspell a word here or there, I doubt that will hurt your credibility as
much as if your own internal content was full of spelling errors.
? Consumers will tend to generate the most feedback on your most
popular offerings.
When you collect feedback on your site, if you let feedback givers rate the quality
of an item, it might be a good idea to create a feedback page for each rating type.
This will help improve conversion rates if spiders index pages that are consistent in
theme and message.
You also want to make sure you are not running into pagination errors where you
require spiders to jump through many hoops to index all your feedback. Any
sorting option you give site visitors should be given to search bots as well, but as
static text links.
It also makes sense to include more content per feedback page instead of less. If
you have fewer feedback pages, then you do not need to index as many pages.
Many long-tail searches will match different words left by different writers. For
example, one of my sites with feedback about medication and depression
frequently matches searches for things like
One person who left feedback mentioned how it affected their libido, while
another mentioned how it left them with orgasm-related issues. Instead of listing
five or ten feedback messages per page, by offering 20 to 50 feedback messages per
page, it creates a much larger overlap of relevant text, and as a result, search engines
will find the page relevant.
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