7 July 2010Wine shopping comparison websites is a seemingly dry topic but as you dig into it you see just what an opportunity and threat it is. You could now have a Google search results page for XX brand wine with the first 1-2 listings being for the winery, next 3 spots for shopping results with an image, 2 spots for other comparison shopping engines, 1 spot for videos with thumbnails, and finally 1 spot for an organic result. On the Adwords side you may have images in the ads for those merchants who use the Google product search service as well as Checkout badges.
8 June 2010Copying wine descriptions isn’t really an issue with wineries given that they are usually very happy with wine retailers using their “poetry” (note there are copyright issues). The issue is really with Google. Google is smart. It is very user focused and knows that searchers do not want the same content for every link in the Google search results page. So Google detects duplication of page content. Google knows if a wine description is a duplication of the winery’s description. It only wants to include the “best page”. Google probably regards the “best page” as the winery’s product page*. Therefore the winery will get the ranking for it’s own page. The rest of the pages will be either discarded (in SEO language made “supplemental”) or given a poor ranking for organic (“left side”) search results.