Lesson 24Bringing in Content from Other Sites

You know how to enter content into Posts and Pages, but there are some kinds of content you want to display from other places. This involves showing content that actually resides on another site, not quoting from another site.

For example, real estate agents usually have their listings with a third-party service, such as MLS. It wouldn't make sense to re-create all or some of those listings on the agent's website; that's a lot of wasted time and energy. But if the listings from the service could be integrated to seamlessly look like part of the site, visitors wouldn't need to leave the site, and the agent would have to maintain only one set of listings.

When talking about bringing in content from other sites, this does not mean

  • Stealing content from others (using it without their permission)
  • Duplicating content that's on other sites (with permission)

Both of these actions have bad consequences, so just don't do it. The first is wrong, morally and legally.

The second can cause, at worst, blacklisting of your page/site by search engines, and at the least, if you duplicate content from your own sites, a potential dilution of your search engine ranking can occur (when some people link to one page or site and some to another).

This kind of content can be divided into three primary groups:

  • Social media feeds (covered in Lesson 22, “Connecting to Social Media”)
  • Content you pay for or have permission to use that comes from a third party ...

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