A strategy employed by several tools, often web page builders, is to create a snippet of text from a source that is not the current article/page. This snippet of text, ideally, uses keywords from the topic of the main article in order to increase relevance.

The concept is simple; search engines, currently do not read HTML and so they ’see’ only the text on the page. When the search engines parse the page content they index the content of the article, including the text snippet, and are supposed to count the whole as unique content.

There is support for the validity of this approach. In practical terms it is the same as the ‘Google approved’ method of uniqueifying by adding relevant commentary to an article. The technique of having text boxes is a recognised page/site design technique as it increases reader involvement in the page and, if the snippets carry functioning links, enables the reader to easily follow his/her interests deeper into the site. Thus it is unlikley that the use of snippets, per se, will ever be penalised by search engines but they may begin to start to consider the footprints that may be visible.

Some snippet insertion systems use a very heavy footprint such as a ’snippethere’ tag which makes it obvious what is happening is an artificial attempt to game the search engines. So, if considering using such a tool check the actual page output before purchasing it!

ContentComposer does not use snippet insertion as the tool is not a page builder. Adding commentaries to Content Composer documents is, though, very easy.

I use snippets extensively in my sites when I am using large quantities of syndicated material and wish to avoid duplicate content filtering whilst still providing value to my readers. In practice it seems to work well, especially when implemented with a strong link building strategy.

 

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