Data feeds - Good or bad?

[Adam_C]

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Have been considering the merrits of using affiliate product data feeds recently, particularly with one future project.

One of the obvious benefits is the ability to create significant additional content for your site at the click of a button, more or less.

One problem I see with this though is getting past the search engines duplicate content filters. (It seems that Google's was tightened up in recent months.)

So, if anyone's got any info they'd care to share I'm all ears.

[darrenw]

Data feeds are a good thing - but I think affiliates need to make more imaginitive use of them now, partially because of Google's duplicate content filter.

Sites that are entirely based on product feeds, with no additional original content or "added value" are not going to survive long...

Thanks,
Darren.

[999gi]

Theres an old saying that I cant quite remember which says something along the lines of "when everyone starts jumping on the bandwagon its time to jump off". I think this applies to Data Feeds to some extent

Obviously they are useful for providing content relevant to your site, and they are core to price/product comparison sites, but the days of

FEEDS + SEO = CASH

are pretty much gone now or at least for new projects.


Ive still got feeds on some sites and I am adding a few here and there where it makes sense content wise for my sites, but I using them more for my users now that for SEO.

[pricethat]

It depends how you use the feeds, if you just stick one product on a page using the data that the merchant provided then your going to have duplicate data.

Just because one row of data is the same doesnt mean that its duplicate content, google isnt going to pickup the fact that one or two lines are the same and ban the whole site because of it.

Also if your using two feeds combined then your joining content to make a whole new peice of content. Inserting content into your own existing site content isnt too much to be worried about, its blatent copy and paste that google is trying to wash, it doesnt benefit anyone.

Also once you made a site its easy to just add lots of domains, post the same site and link to each other to raise your ratings, this is what google are stopping more than anything.

Feeds are great, you can do what you like with them, but beware, most feeds have errors in them so its not as simple as you described the more you get into it