Copy content from Amazon Products?

[shewrites]

Hey guys,

In the last an year or so, I have focussed myself on learning Ruby and I have built a custom application for an idea thats based around Amazon products.

Now, this is a pure white-hat method, and I was wondering if I can use product description (or related content) from these Amazon products. What I really need (at minimum) is a summary of these products, and yes I have tried summarising these product descriptions using Summary APIs, but they produce bad results.

So, what I wanted to know was if its okay to use product description for these products verbatim, or can I do something else to avoid Google banhammer?
Also, I am guessing copying product features should not be bad, since they are pretty much static.

Regards,

 

[richardleb]

Amazon does not want you to copy their products description. you will end up not getting good results

 

[IMTopgun]

Just take the Amazon description and rewrite in your own words.

 

[dlyhai]

Your account would end up be blocked.

 

[shewrites]

Thank you for the answers, guys. What about summary generated by extracting a few important lines from the description?

 

[rainmaker777]

I see sites copying and pasting the content all the time. Is that actually true that they'd end up blocking the account?

 

[blogzandstuff]

As others have said, it's far better to write you own version of the description, i do this a lot. I copy and past into notepad, make a line underneath it and manually rewrite an original version

 

[rainmaker777]

Sure, just very time consuming if trying to list a bunch of products. I guess it depends on the site.

 

[blogzandstuff]

you could spin the descriptions, but even then you have to read through them to make sure they make sense.

 

[jediwarrior]

I would go get some writers from textbroker or zerys to re write the descriptions at a cheap price.

 

[keadams26]

Product descriptions will get you nowhere. Your content should be unique. Sure, you can copy the content but don't you realize tens of thousands of marketers are doing this exact same thing? Do you think that because your site is written in Ruby its going to outrank the others? That's horseshit. It's awesome you can program in ruby, most can't, but the googs could give two shits about anything other than the quality and uniqueness of your content and the quality of your SEO.

 

[Y Combinator]

This is a good question. Some of the content in Amazon listings is explicitly marked as copy-righted - it won't even be returned from any Amazon API. But I am not 100% sure if this also applies to content that isn't explicitly marked as copy-righted. I suppose you would have to check with Amazon to be 100% sure as there might still be "fair-use" provisions that would allow you to use it (and I actually imagine this isn't that far-fetched because Amazon -wants- web masters to be able to use that content to market their products so you might be pleasantly surprised.)

 

[shewrites]

Product descriptions will get you nowhere. Your content should be unique. Sure, you can copy the content but don't you realize tens of thousands of marketers are doing this exact same thing? Do you think that because your site is written in Ruby its going to outrank the others? That's horseshit. It's awesome you can program in ruby, most can't, but the googs could give two shits about anything other than the quality and uniqueness of your content and the quality of your SEO.

whoa! who said that the site being in Ruby gets SEO advantage? I didn't.
What I meant to say was that it is an aggregation site, and I want to copy content from Amazon products, but only if it doesn't hurt my SEO a lot. And, I guess, now I know that I should not.