Affiliate Datafeeds - Duplicate Content and More

[Linda Buquet]

Back in the day you could just slap up a datafeed site & do well. Not any more! This post from Scott Jangro and a video from Matt Cutts of Google explains…

Datafeed Do’s and Don’ts By Scott Jangro

Back in the “good old days”, it was easy to build a gigantic website based on the products provided by one or more merchants… (then) Literally overnight, high-traffic, high-earning datafeed-based affiliate websites fell off the map, closing another chapter in the long, twisted relationship between affiliate marketers and search engines.

Over the years, we’ve had a lot of successes and failures using product datafeeds. As such, we learned a lot about what works and doesn’t work with using retail product data, and being successful comes down to a few simple rules.

VIDEO - Matt Cutts of Google on Datafeeds
Here is a very short video about product descriptions and duplicate content.



Thanks to Minstrel (David) for the heads up on this video!

[Teli]

This is definitely a biggie Linda. It's also something I discussed a couple years ago, too. The best solution I've found to date? Taking the time to modify the product descriptions when you receive a merchant's datafeed or actually taking the time to provide some sort of unique content on your site and setting up the datafeed section as a separate store on the site. Unfortunately, both of those avenues take some level or work and work is bad.

~ Teli