Hello everyone, I wanted to know if it was OK to copy a competitors keyword structure. Let's say I sell flowers, and one of my competitors landing pages are define as follows: Title: flower delivery | send flowers online | Anniversary flowers Meta description: Anniversary Flower Bouquets, Anniversary Flower Arrangement, Anniversary Gift Flowers, Anniversary Flower Basket Keywords: Send flowers online as well as Anniversary gift ideas including Anniversary flowers and gift basket Now all that are included in the aforementioned settings are all generic words and without any trademarks or copyrighted. I would think it's OK for me to do this however, this is one page - lets say they have 20 landing pages like this all with generic words. Can I copy the approach and mimic their strategy and also have 20 pages that would look extremely similar to their 20 pages and get away with it? Of course.... I have my own unique content all I want to know if I can copy their generic keyword and title structure, or maybe just switch the keywords around a bit which will keep the same words but in a different order. Thanks,
I don't see why it is. What if, by chance, someone does the same without knowing someone else has the same thing? It's not really copying. You can't copyright that.
I think brum is correct, but I would avoid such a direct attack on my competitor. If you get a better idea, you have already set the "theft" of ideas precedent and they will take your's. I would minimally change the order of the keywords and add something of my own. I would also take the time to consider whether or not those keywords are actually going to generate the best results for my site. People have said you can get good clues to effective keywords from the search terms used to reach your site. Your web logs contain that information. Some people also take a close look at the sites of market leaders for clues as to keywords which work and keyword densities which work.
OK, I could and will write my own meta description, however this particular site is dominating the long tail of the product we are commonly selling. And I notice that they do the following: title: they keep it short as possible, sometimes when is one key phrase like "buy blue widgets" they do this instead - " buy blue widgets, widgets" they repeat the main keyword. again they only do this if the phrase is short. meta description: OK this is where I see a really different strategy. instead of putting in here something like "we buy and sell all types of widgets online" they actually insert their keywords phrases in here - "buy blue widgets online, purchase red widgets, wholesale black widgets..........." you get the idea. Keywords: here they actually write their meta description - "Big Bad Widgets - we are a whole distributor of widgets." They swap the meta and description on all of their 2000+ pages ......They are not a big company and have not been around a long time "December 2004" yet they are basically are dominating the long tail and are raking higher than the "big boys" in our industry..... I am wondering if this is the way to go. I know there are so many other different factors that could lead to their dominance, however some of the landing pages have like 2 IBL and are top 3 in the SERPs for a specific term - If you think about it the SE chooses to display the title and the description and not keywords, therefore if your descriptions have only 4 to 5 key phrases (making the page more relevant) they are going to show up in the SE results -- well on this point i am not sure of this, that's what I am trying to figure out
It isn't illegal to copy a site's keyword structure or description, but if they hold a copyright or TM for it, then it sure is illegal. IT
They can hold TradeMarks for neologisms used in the keywords, but not already existing dictionary words. So don't worry livestatic, it's fine
I would try to avoid doing that, specially if the site is well ranked. Not because of copyright troubles, but it might trigger some duplicate filters, if not completely, to some extent may be... (Not sure...) If you plan on doing that, you might want to rearrange the words a little. Bye
You have nothing to worry about, but I would not copy them exactly. That 'buy blue widgets, widgets' should be 'buy blue widgets, widget' or another variation. It's just a guess on what you have provided, but it sounds like they are in the spot they are because of something other than their seo mods (assuming it's google we're talking about). Dig a little deeper and I'll bet you find exactly what you're looking for!
You can copy any keywords as long as they are generic. If you couldn't then google would only list a small % of what they allready do, as would all engines.
If their content is copyrighted, it is illegal to copy any part of their website including meta tags.
Maybe if the meta tags contained company names or patented brands or similar. But keywords in meta tags? I would be surprised if even the greediest and sneakiest law firms picked up that one! Col
I don't think keywords can be copyrighted but word for word copying of meta descriptions and such I think is not being smart. Why not research the words and find out which are better instead of copying?
Google doesn't display keywords so you're way off the mark here. They use "fair use" as their defence for publishing snippets off websites.