Building eCommerce store with affiliate datafeed - How to avoid duplicate content penalty?

[paper_chase]

I'm currently building an eCommerce store using the Datafeedr Wordpress plugin. If you aren't familiar with the plugin it basically allows you to add products to your Wordpress site using data from the merchants data feed. On my site when a user clicks the "Buy" button they are directed to the product page on the merchants site via my affiliate link.

With the data feed you get a 50-100 word product description that appears on the product detail page.

I did a search for some of the descriptions and it looks like close to 900 sites are using the same descriptions.

I want to have close to 1000 products. So basically that's 1000 pages of duplicate content. What should I do? Should I put a "no-index,no-follow" meta tag on all of these pages?

The whole point of creating this site is that I found a good domain name and I want the homepage to rank well for the main product term. For example, "Blue Widgets". I also want the category pages to rank well. I will add alot of unique content to the homepage and category pages so they rank well, but I'm worried about getting penalized for all the duplicate content on the product pages. I don't care if the product pages rank well, that's why I am ok with putting a "no-index" on them.

Any tips/advice is greatly appreciated!

 

[Colonel Tuxedo]

Since you're not trying to rank the product pages, and won't be doing any linkbuilding for them, why not just use a rel=canonical and reference the merchants product pages?

I'm really surprised the plugin doesn't automatically do this actually.

 

[paper_chase]

Since you're not trying to rank the product pages, and won't be doing any linkbuilding for them, why not just use a rel=canonical and reference the merchants product pages?

I'm really surprised the plugin doesn't automatically do this actually.

Hmmmm....I've never heard of someone doing a cross site rel=canonical. Is it meant to be used like that? Plus that is waving a red flag to google that I'm a thin affiliate site.

 

[Getwhatchuwant]

Canonical is meant for internal pages only.

You won't be hit by dupe filter - google treats ecommerce sites differently.

Plus, your whole website won't be dupe right? Just the product pages.

Im not sure about that (with all due respect) I have 2 ecommerce sites, one is WP based and one is HTML these 2 sites are VERY difficult to rank even though I can rank sites without dup content. I am going to be getting the WP based on redone by paying a writer to come in and rewrite about 80 different products, I will keep you posted with the results

 

[keinehabe]

for wordpress ( well if you use wp I mean ) there on bhw you will find an plugin called writeagain! I used it ( with other plugins ofc suited for my setups ) but ... the thing is the plugin rewrite your pages / posts on fly , the content most of the time will be perfectly readable and passing copyscape filters . However there is a small catch into this since google already '' knows '' about those products you will see pretty hard times to rank it well . I`ve used some kamikaze stuffs and I found it's better to push to the limits linkbuilding process since your site anyway will get deindexed from search engines at the end of the day there is no reason at all to actually play softly with the links ... in short term it's works and I found some merchants of mine performing pretty well . Good luck !

 

[georgegaskin]

The only other alternative is to edit each product 1 by 1,thats what I am doing on a smaller site of about 100 products,after there imported.I have been whanting to try Datafeedr watched some of there videos on how to use it,looks like great tool.

 

[shizah]

I've been looking at datafeedr as well...I thought the only way is to avoid the penalty is making each description unique.

Maybe xenix 9 is onto something...the products would be duped, but have a blog with unique content on it. Also, adding the about us, privacy policy, and testimonials pages.