Web Services + hReviews = Trouble
My brother thoroughly enjoys picking apart the flaws of the Internet. We often don’t really see eye-to-eye on a wide-range of topics, but this time he has written a piece that has caught my attention for sure. It is on the pitfalls of microformats being used in conjunction with web services incorrectly, or should I say what is seemingly unethical. Straight from the DisconnectTheDots blog:
“It appears that this deals site is using hReview markup in their product pages and getting indexed in the Reviews section of Technorati’s fairly new Microformats Search. I would say that this looks like quite a nice site normally. Unfortunately, the issue is that they use the Amazon.com API for data (as do many) and the way they’ve marked it up, all they do is round up Amazon’s average rating for the product, use the title of the product to markup the name (item fn), attempt to have the amazon user reviews in the “description” field, sneak in the “type” field of product with an abbr near the bottom of the page, and have a link that just links back to Dealazon’s own product page” (Read Full Entry)
So basically, my take from his entry, and from what I see is that Dealazon is submitting Amazon user reviews to Technorati and passing them as their own? (See example here) Why? Free traffic I assume. Not sure if telling people about this is a good idea or not since most will do about anything to get more traffic these days! I knew that this could be done a while ago. Tech.yahoo.com uses its own web services and marks up user reviews in hReview format… So what is to stop other sites from doing the same?
Its tempting to me to test this and see what kind of traffic is gained from this type of activity. However, Shopping.com makes you markup the Epinions reviews in a certain fashion. Amazon and Yahoo! may eventually want to follow this method too.
The trouble in doing this is duplicate content being submitted to aggregators. Duplicate content with no value-added is looked down upon by the majority of the Internet community and rightly so. It is not practical and not effeicient.
So those of you interested in structured blogging, I’ll let you decide. Is this an ethical practice for an affiliate or should the link always be back to the main review source?
Technorati Tags: technorati, pingerati, dealazon, reviews, hreviews, microformats, structured blogging, dulicate content, amazon, web services
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Update: I’ve written a follow-up highlighting some other even less subtle ways people are doing this and getting indexed.
Right now it may not make a big difference in traffic since I doubt many are using the fairly new Technorati indexer to search for real reviews. There aren’t many sites out there that are indexing them yet either that I know of. But it will become a huge problem and a giant mess if things aren’t set in place to prevent hreview fraud/spam.
I’ve dropped a few notes here and there with queries about such concerns so we’ll see if I turn up anything.
Eventually what it may come down to is using personal indexing methods and subscribing to certain reviewers etc. So, pretty much what we do right now with feeds.
Ja