Blog Posts for Ruby Lane Shop Credit

I've been a semi regular blog poster to the Ruby Lane "Notes from the Lane" for several years. My goal was/is to become more faithful about writing my blog to earn the maximum credit every month to offset my shop fees. With almost 1,000 items in the shop, they can get rather high.

Last month I had submitted an article and I was surprised when I received a polite response saying, yes, they would accept that article, but in the future, they would no longer accept articles I wrote that had been published elsewhere first. Elsewhere being my personal blog on blogger, COBAYLEY, my page here on TVV, my page on Facebook, COBAYLEY, etc. I understood that and withdrew my request that they publish that article. I fully understand the Ruby Lane wants their blog articles to be fresh and they want to be the first to publish them....I wrote another article and submitted it, I assured them that it had not been published elsewhere and that I would wait to publish it to my blog. No problem. It was published and I received my $35.00 credit.

Yesterday, I wrote the article about the Lalique perfume. I submitted it and again assured Ruby Lane that I had not published it elsewhere, that I had gone the extra steps to have the long conversation threads removed from Facebook and TVV. I assured them that I would wait until Ruby Lane published the article (if they chose to) to post it to my blog.

This morning I received this message back from Ruby Lane..."

"You can post the link from Notes From The Lane after we post it on our
blog, however, you can't take the content itself and make a "new" blog
post about. This would be duplicate content, rather than sharing.
If you are ok with this, please let me know and I can publish your article"



I was surprised as I had never been aware of this.  
I did a quick check on a few of the Ruby Lane "Notes from the Lane" and found several that 
were posted on personal blogs.  There was no linking to Ruby Lane's blog whatsoever.

So...I'm wondering if $35.00 is enough for my sharing my R Lalique Perfume story....
I'm going to have to think about this.  
I would not be able to publish the blog post here, I would only be able to provide a link to the 
Ruby Lane Notes, the same applying to my Facebook business page, I would only be able to link 
back to the "Notes", I could not publish the article in it's entirety anywhere...

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Pearl's Parlor on June 22, 2012 at 6:43am

Cheri - I know that items we show on TVV appear on Google. If the link on TVV points back to our shop, is there any problem with Google and duplicate content?

Permalink Reply by CheriShops - Admin on June 22, 2012 at 7:36am

As far as I know (lol and that aint much) the photo and link are not seen as duplication but if we have copied, word for word, the exact same description that we have in our shop listing, that might be frowned on by G as they(more specifically their search bots) may see it as a duplicated listing.

Permalink Reply by COBAYLEY on June 22, 2012 at 9:44am

Well, I did what someone in the conversation suggested. I searched for an item I had here on my page at TVV and of course, is also listed in my shop. It came up # 2 in the google search for the shop listing and #6 in the google search for TVV listing. I'm going to do more random tests today. What I didn't do yesterday, is I didn't link nearly as many items to my social networks as I usually do. I usually link at least 10 to 15 items to various pages on Facebook. My "hits" to items in my shop dropped. I usually have around 2400 hits to item pages, it was 1300 this morning. Great conversation going here, glad I started it..lol...

Permalink Reply by Out Of The Attic 2u on June 22, 2012 at 9:46am

Me too! I am learning more and more about google, now I just have to learn about where I am in their search. Yes I am a little slow in that area :)

Permalink Reply by Pearl's Parlor on June 22, 2012 at 9:48am

I tried it too using my title for the item rather than keywords. Not sure if that makes a difference or not but probably places it higher. In the two cases, the listing for Ruby Lane came in #1 with TVV at #2. Not bad at all. I'll try it with a few others to see what happens.

Permalink Reply by San Marcos Art Glass on June 22, 2012 at 10:20am

Sorry I deleted the posts, guys. I was getting inconsistent results, so didn't want to add confusion to the thread. Others are getting the same type results I am. With the newest listings, I only got the RL and not the TVV, but it showed up today. It just took a bit longer to find TVV apparently.

Permalink Reply by San Marcos Art Glass on June 22, 2012 at 10:22am

One question -- Google still does not crawl FB and Pinterest, right? I heard they were going to do Pinterest searches, but I haven't seen any evidence of it in my searches.

Permalink Reply by COBAYLEY on June 22, 2012 at 10:30am

Yes...they are doing Pinterest. I've had a few items I searched for bring up a pinterest link...not my items, but something else I was looking for...and yes, some of my links to pages on FB do show up on google search..

Permalink Reply by San Marcos Art Glass on June 22, 2012 at 10:37am

Thanks, Carolyn. I am going to have to revamp my strategy with the changes that are coming up. I don't really think that we "white hat" people will face any problems, but I know there are things I can do better. I just get lazy, doing things the easiest way.

Permalink Reply by COBAYLEY on June 22, 2012 at 10:40am

San Marcos...don't I know it...the lazy thing...we get so used to doing certain things one way that change seems like a very painful thing...I think that the one thing I'm going to try and remember is that unlike a brick and mortar antique mall, I have millions of shops competing for the money, not 30 or 40 booth owners. Keeping it fresh and vibrant and new is my mantra....I've been doing it here on TVV for about a month. At least every 48 hours, I change out at least 2 items in my picture links...foot traffic to the shop is up (except for yesterday)...

Permalink Reply by ElsiesAttic ~ CEO on June 22, 2012 at 10:49am

Ning does give us a tool to submit and I did it years ago. It's not the same thing as Google products, but it does alert Google of our web presence. I had forms and code to fill out.

CheriShops - Admin said:

Nope, because you don't have a Google account as a marketplace and feed our stuff to it :)

As far as Product indexing goes, they state they will give warnings first and then either suspend for a period, and then indefinitely if not heeded. However, that doesn't always happen as sometimes they seem to just stop indexing a specific shop that belongs to a marketplace feed and the marketplace claims to not have received any warnings? so who knows.....................

For organic search they "reserve the right" to stop indexing any website that they consider breaking their rules. But I learned on an Etsy discussion that they really are more looking for those trying to be deceptive to get higher rankings. I don't think TVV would be considered in violation as a site from what I am learning...but that us sellers individually do need to carefully look at their rules and guidelines and do our best to comply

ElsiesAttic-Admin said:

So if we were in some sort of violation then I would be notified?

CheriShops - Admin said:

the bots do the indexing but when something gets flagged, the peeps are the ones that check it as far as I know, and either allow or disallow the feed/indexing and send the violation notices to the individual website or marketplace.

Permalink Reply by ElsiesAttic ~ CEO on June 22, 2012 at 10:56am

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I wish every PM would do this!!!!! :) Refreshing those listings and adding new ones is key!

Just do one a week at the very least and you will see for yourself folks, don't take my word for it. :)

COBAYLEY said:

San Marcos...don't I know it...the lazy thing...we get so used to doing certain things one way that change seems like a very painful thing...I think that the one thing I'm going to try and remember is that unlike a brick and mortar antique mall, I have millions of shops competing for the money, not 30 or 40 booth owners. Keeping it fresh and vibrant and new is my mantra....I've been doing it here on TVV for about a month. At least every 48 hours, I change out at least 2 items in my picture links...foot traffic to the shop is up (except for yesterday)...