The other day I posed a question on Twitter; “If you could learn more about one aspect of affiliate marketing, what would it be?” and a large portion of the responses I got back as a result were about using affiliate datafeeds. Even more specifically, several of them revolved around datafeed usage and duplicate content in regards to SEO.
I’ve used (and still use) a lot of datafeeds in the construction of my affiliate sites and have learned quite a bit in regards to using them over the years. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pass along some of what I’ve learned to help a few Twitterkin out.
Information for Merchants
The first and foremost rule merchants need to follow to protect themselves is that you should never, EVER give your affiliates an exact copy of the datafeed you use on your own site. While Google does their best to figure out who is the original owner of duplicate content when they find it, bottom line is that a lot of it comes down to site age and strength.
What that means is that the older and stronger (in regards to quality links) a site is, the better the chance it has of winning out as the “original source” of the content, and as a result, being the page to appear in the search results when that content is deemed the most relevant for the users query.
Top affiliates have been at this game a long time and as a result, many have aged, strong sites. If you give them an exact copy of your own feed, you could end up knocking your own site out of the search results for your terms.
Does that mean you shouldn’t offer a datafeed to your affiliates?
HELL NO!
Datafeeds are a valuable tool for affiliates, and one you should be offering if you have a large inventory of products. The key is to provide affiliates with a datafeed without potentially harming your own rankings. And that means creating a separate, rewritten datafeed for your affiliates to use with rewritten product descriptions.
And no, you don’t need to create a separate feed for EACH affiliate. You simply need two versions of your feed. One for you (the merchant) and one for all of your affiliates to use. They’ll find some tips on dealing with their own potential duplicate content issues with other affiliates below.
And while I have the attention of a few merchants, here are some additional tips on creating happy, profitable affiliates.
Information for Affiliates
Now, you’ll have to respect that I can’t give you EVERY tip I’ve learned over the years about using datafeeds… a girl has to keep some form of a competitive edge. But I can share a few things with you and folks can feel free to leave more tips in the comments below if they’d like.
Accept that the feed isn’t “plug and play” when it comes to SEO
Using an affiliate datafeed acts as a solid foundation of content for your individual product pages and is not “your content” if you want to do well with SEO (and aren’t the “strongest” affiliate site using the feed). You’re going to need to create additional fields in the datafeed and fill it with unique content.
That content can be additional information about the product or uses of the product, additional information that describes the product or anything else you can dream up. But you need to value add to make the content “technically unique” AS WELL AS “conceptually unique“.
Switch things up
Don’t display things in the same order that they appear in the feed. If there are 8 different fields describing the product, switch up the order in which they appear from the feed or randomize how they appear from the feed if you have the programming skills to do so (we’re talking height, width and depth type fields here and not placing the height above the description).
Change up the image names
I don’t ever leave the images on the merchant’s server. I always download the images to my own site (and size them properly, if they aren’t already) and give them new naming conventions. It helps separate you from every other affiliate site out there using the same feed.
Change up the affiliate links
Even ignoring the duplicity of the datafeed, you should be running your affiliate links through redirects in a blocked folder for your own tracking purposes.
Add value
Every time I say this phrase in regards to affiliate marketing, a Googler gets their wings. But you need to add some additional value to the feed if you want your site to pass a hand review (even if you’re not in a competitive – aka “watched” field, you never know if your competitors agree with me or not).
This might be giving visitors the ability to leave reviews, this might be giving users the ability to compare prices between different merchants, this might be a lot of things. But differentiation on a true scale, in addition to the technical differentiation listed above will put you a long way ahead of your competitors that are too lazy to do so.
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{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
Awesome post! You say we need “technically unique” and “conceptually unique“. Is it ever possible to do both at the same time? Or just get away with one? Like I am thinking about pulling geo data out and making a map mashup for each product. While i think that is “conceptually unique“ for the user, I am not sure if its “technically unique” enough to make it stand out in the spider’s eyes.
Is this an issue if I can provide something useful to the user? do I need to still worry about being unique to the spiders?
Another great job Rae of helping us be more professional by covering all the bases.
Regards,
Dave
Rae, I attended your session at the conference, and enjoyed it very much. It was nice to hear from somebody who talks as fast as I do! Quick question: For those of us that have never used a product data feed, can you point us in the direction of some resources that can help us get started. Some questions that come to mind include, do we use a tool (e.g., datafeedr) to bring in the feed or hire a programmer, do we dump the feed into a database on our server or access the feed everytime the page is loaded? Thanks.
DR there are a lot of ways to go about it. I’d say if you’re brand spanking new, Webmerge might be a good place to start.
nice tips, can you expand on this “you should be running your affiliate links through redirects in a blocked folder for your own tracking purposes. “
Very interesting blog, I am always wary or duplicate content in terms of SEO, yet it has never crossed my mind about duplicate content for affiliate schemes. Amazon must have a lot of duplicate content going on? Or does it not actually pick up on that site as it is in an i-frame?
Hey there, enjoyed your post. Do you have any good suggestions of what types of software to run your feeds through to modify them as you said?
Duplicate content has always been a concern of mine. During the earlier days of the internet I worked for companies who duplicated content like there was no tomorrow. Well that fell through and there are multiple domains that now all point back to the main site. It actually worked at one point in time though. Back then you could gain extra market share by using that tactic. Now it’s a complete turn around. I make it a point to educate my clients about duplicating articles and text and that it really needs to be unique, well written, quality content. From an affiliate marketing perspective it should be applied too. All area’s require this kind of attention!
“you could end up knocking your own site out of the search results for your terms” – I’ve seen that happen, then when you explain why to a company they get mad at the affiliate, when all that affiliate is doing is using what they gave them!
Rae, it’s good advice to use ones own brain and to figure out, how to add value to a feed. But it’s like serious juggling. On the one hand one cannot individualize the feed data seriously, because risks in trade law or simply because of the efforts if the products change in future. On the other hand one wants to profit from the feed data in an as automatic as possible way. Left in the air is the good idea how to add value. And none of this may drop…
Thanks and cheers,
Mart
rae, nicely done once again.
@Jamie… I don’t trust the affiliates to track the clicks coming through my links. So we run everything through redirects in a folder like /send/ so we can track how many times the link has been clicked on our site and then match that up (or not) with the numbers the affiliate companies show us. In addition, by running them through a redirect that is in a blocked off folder, we don’t send a bunch of juice to the affiliate merchant to help their link development process (they can do their own). Lastly, the links being to our own internal site and not to the affiliate merchant allows for another small signal of differentiation. Hope this helps.
Hi Rae,
I’m very much interested in using datafeeds from different merchants for price comparison purposes.
Do you know of some good resources to get started?
Tutorials that you may have learned from to use and incorporate datafeeds to create a price comparison site?
Your input is very much appreciated! :)
Thanks!
@Rae
In response to your last comment@Jamie… I’ve been building a couple of affiliate type sites and had been relying (probably naively) on the honesty of the affiliates. I like the idea of redirecting through a folder for all the benefits you describe especially the fact that you can count the clicks that way and then compare to what the affiliate says. Will look at setting this up… I suppose if theres a lot of affiliate links, to have a small php script with the urls in a database table that can also log the clicks would be the best way to go…
Thanks, Joe
Hi Rae,
This might be a slightly stupid question but for merchants with huge feeds, do you download each image manually or do you have software to do this for you?
Cheers,
Paul
I second PaulG’s question. It can’t be manually, its impossible. It has to be some sort of a custom software/script you built, right Rae ?
Hi Rae,
Thanks for sharing this invaluable piece of information with us. I have been handling a bunch of affiliate sites for quite some time now and have been planning to promote the sites by starting PPC campaigns ( I have little experience about it ). I am not quite sure about whether I should go ahead with it. Will that really make a diff.? Also, I will be looking forward to read your answer to Paul’s query about how to host the images on our own server.
Thanks in advance.
Kirti Anand Sharma