Affiliate Content, Duplicate Content And The Crucial Differences Between Them; Er, There Are None...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) September 22, 2010 -- Going by word on the Search Engine news group, alt.internet.search-engines, it's looking like Google is getting better at spotting and demoting affiliate content. It could well be that because the same text content is repeated over and over on

every affiliate site that carries it it gets demoted by Google purely for being duplicate content. I see this as being a problem, a growing problem, for every affiliate merchant and client using a data feed to power the pages. While the templates folk use may well vary in detail due to individuals customising them to their taste, essentially they're all variants on the same theme and of course they all contain the same few lines of text content in the same order.
Repetition of this kind shouldn't be too hard to identify and either ignore or remove from the listings or do whatever with which may well mean in the future that the idea of affiliate sites as we now have them is simply no longer practical.

My crystal gifts site is powered by a feed from GoCollect.com using a Cusimano script. I've personalised the templates so if you know me you'll recognise the standard BB layout of the individual product pages. Visually, therefore, it isn't like any of the other sites using the same feed. It still has the same text content, though. Inputting a sample into Google produces "about 584" results, all of which, or the majority of which we must suspect as I'm not going to go through them all to check it absolutely, are built around the same feed. The problem here for both affiliates and for affiliate merchants and for Google is, what's the point in having them at all? If there's one site that has them,

namely, the original, where's the point in Google having the rest of them in the index? They all sell the same product for the same price, so why bother to index them? At the moment, it's the battle of the SEO's. Why should someone buy product A from my site as opposed to anyone else's? The answer would be, because when they search for product they find my site before they find any of the others, and there are ways of promoting sites with which we are all familiar here. But this can't really last. The world only really needs just the one web site for these custom-made products and speciality items, and that's the one from the original manufacturers. All the rest essentially constitute duplicate content and we know what happens to that, it gets filtered out.

So, to counter this problem, you could substitute your own text for the original, and you could take your own photographs of the product. Not a problem for a small site, however, many have tens of thousands of pages. How is anyone going to re-write that lot? Obviously any lone affiliate can't begin to, so the idea of affiliate sites as we now have them, I think, must inevitably give way to niche sites where the affiliate presents a small range of items in an individual style that will appeal to certain of the buying public.

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