Is it a good thing to link to your own hosted paysite tour?
 

As opposed to just linking to your sponsor url, is it better to save the tour to your own site and then send your traffic straight to that page?

The downside to doing this I just realised the other day is that the paysites tour is more dynamic and has the dates its been updated etc. But it is probably better SE wise to have everything linking to your own internal tours.

What do you think? What do you pros do????

thanks |bananna|

I'm no pro, but I tend to trust sponsors to create tours that best sell a site.

I've only recently begun to build my own tours, and only for sites which I think need something better then what's available - after careful observation, I know a bit more about what my traffic is looking for... I think... still far too early for me to make any judgements.|loony|

Unless you think you have that intimate knowledge about what a surfer is looking for, building a tour is probably a lot of effort to put into something for little return. You're probably better off figuring out how to get people to the tour first. ;)

EDIT:

Oh yeah, and SE traffic doesn't mean squat if ya can't sell anyway. ;)

Unless you have specific permission in writing from the owners of the copyrights on all design work involved in creating the tour pages, and have the licensing rights for all the photos appearing on the tour, along with the 2257-required information on the models/performers in the photos, you could cause yourself quite a bit of trouble if you "save the tour to your own site" the way you mentioned.

Of course, if some sponsors offer tours which they allow you to download and host on your own server, then perhaps you could do it with those and not have any problems.

For the search engines, yes it's good to have content on your site, but not so much good to have content that's a duplicate of what the spiders have already eaten elsewhere. You could even run into some SE 'dupe content' penalties for doing it that way.

The best is what The Hippy mentioned. Building your own tours (using content for which you have proper rights) would be a much better idea.