Duplicate Content, Data Feeds, and ADPS…
Many affiliates seem to have a very difficult time getting their head around being able to make profitable websites using affiliate datafeeds. The two primary reasons for this confusion are: Duplicate Content misunderstandings, and thin affiliate sites. This post is quite long but it explains a heck of a lot, and answers questions most affiliates seem to have…
I received this in a PM recently, and it’s something I’ve been meaning to write up for awhile now so I figured here in the forum was a good place to start [:)]
Sorry for the total newbie question, but am still am bit confused about how I would make money using your data feed script.
Wouldn’t it be considered duplicate content by the search engines?
The script is very interesting, but I want to make sure I understand how I can make money it with before I invest in it.
Any inputs you can provide will be much appreciated.
The primary thing I want to tackle here the question of duplicate content. This is a very misunderstood subject online, and Google themselves have recently posted an official answer to the question:
“…in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index.”
Source: Google Webmaster Blog
Essentially, duplicate content is only a problem if it is within your own website. In other words, if you have the exact same content on more than one page on the same domain, then the search engines may have a problem seeing that as duplicate content.
If different websites are using the same content however, this is not usually considered duplicate. Usually each website will have different navigation menus, design, and other structural and content differences. And these differences are why using the same content is not often seen as duplicate.
This concept is easy to see an action with articles. Take almost any article from a major article directory such as the EzineArticles, and look up that title in search engine. Usually you will find multiple sites with that same article listed. Now, over time Google will decide that one content source is better than the others. So that one may end up being ranked very well in search engine results, while the others may be buried farther back in the results, or even placed into the supplemental results.
Many affiliates have been afraid to use product data feeds for many years because of this duplicate content misunderstanding. Not to mention the technical knowledge needed to actually use affiliate data feeds. 
Most data feed site builder programs contribute to this problem. They take an affiliate data feed and create a new page for every single product in the feed. So the program goes through a data feed line by line extracting the product information, and creating a website page specifically for that product. So if 1000 affiliates are using the exact same merchant data feed, then there may be 1000 or more websites with very similar pages on them. This is made worse if the affiliate is simply slapping those pages online in a mass production effort, instead of actually trying to create a useful website.
These types of sites are what Google refers to as “thin affiliate sites”. Google doesn’t particularly care for thin affiliate sites.
The original software that I created which ADPS was based on, was a data feed site builder that did exactly as described above. To help differentiate the sites from other data feed sites online, I actually built in a synonym functionality which would replace some of the product description wording and make it more unique. (No that’s not currently available) I also created custom website layouts and designs, and tried to add as much extra content to the site as I could to add value.
And that is how ADPS evolved. I wanted to exploit the profit potential of affiliate data feeds in a better way. One of the things I did, is make it so that ADPS can use more than one merchant data feed at a time. I also designed it so that it creates product posts with more than one product in them, so that the actual end page looks more like a product comparison. This adds more content since more than one product is on the page, and since it randomly selects those products, the collection of words and pictures are always different. Instead of having one page with one product on it, which thousands of others may have across the web, I have a page on my site with multiple products that are mixed randomly. So it’s never quite the same as any other page that may be available somewhere else online.
I originally discovered this method when building websites by hand. I still used the WordPress blog system, but instead of posting articles and content, I created product posts instead. One of my very first ones was about cute kitchen cabinet knobs. All I did was create a post that had four or five different types of kitchen cabinet knobs which were similar in theme, their pictures, and their product descriptions. And that one page on my website did amazingly well. It got excellent search engine attention, high search engine rankings, and lots of targeted traffic. Just the simple act of putting related products together in a relevant manner, allowed me to use the readily available content from product data feeds.
I was too lazy to keep repeating this process manually. So I enhanced my data feed site builder, and made it do something similar in WordPress. Today’s version of ADPS was grown from that.
The random product selection ADPS does is a very powerful step towards preventing duplicate content issues or thin affiliate site issues. And the fact that it picks products from more than one merchant feed at a time adds to that power because even your merchant website will not have the exact same mix of products. And it’s extremely unlikely that other affiliates even in your niche, will use the exact same merchant data feeds you choose to use.
If you glance through the Warrior Special Offer forum, you will see the exact same concept in action. Product review pages for click bank products are being sold there almost every day. All those pages are is a selection of three to five click bank products, compared on one page. ADPS does the exact same thing. It just does it with tangible products, and it does it automatically. And it keeps doing it over a given length of time so your site is continually growing automatically.
There is one thing I do feel the need to always caution about though: If you use very small data feeds, say something which only has five or 10 products in it, you will most likely get duplicate content on your website. This is because there’s not enough data to use an automated system with. The automation features of ADPS are designed to work with more than 1 feed, and the feeds should have a decent amount of products in them. My preference is to use a minimum of three merchant data feeds, with at least 1000 products or more in each.
Realize that no website can have an income guarantee. But, the more monetized content you put out there, the better chances you have of earning good to great income from it. Like any website, you do need to send traffic to it, and that traffic has to be targeted to the content you have. Wordpress helps a lot in this regard because it sends out a ping to search engines and RSS feed directories each time a new post is published. This will help your website grow slowly on its own. You can make things happen faster if you write articles, buy links, or do any other standard website promotion techniques.
When you get targeted traffic to pages with your affiliate links on them, a percentage of those targeted visitors will click your affiliate links and buy the products. When this happens, you make money. The more often this happens, the more money you make. And the more pages of affiliate products you have online, the more targeted traffic, clicks, and commissions you can get.
Hopefully all of this information hasn’t just confused you more and has actually helped.
If you have additional questions though, please don’t hesitate to ask
Kathy
P.S. ADPS Version 2.6 Was Recently Released. Check out the new screenshots and features here…
July 5th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Hi Kathy. Love the idea of your plugin which I just bought. But now I have run into an implementation question:
I was hoping to use it (on a different domain) to publish different datafeeds into different folders where each folder is for a different product/topic/niche. In other words, a somewhat broad shopping site with many departments. (I have a spare shopping-named domain waiting to be used!).
Can ADPS do that?
Or do I need one domain per ADPS installation?
I searched the PDF manual and couldnt find anything about subdomains so I am thinking it’s one topic per site. Mind you, I would love for you to tell me I am wrong.
Gary
July 5th, 2008 at 6:57 am
Hi Gary,
I’m answering this here are for the benefit of everyone, but I’ll also send it to you in e-mail to make sure you don’t miss it.
ADPS will work with any working, recent version install of WordPress. And since WordPress can run on a subdomain, main domain, or even in a folder or directory of the main domain or subdomain, ADPS will also work in these situations. So as long as your WordPress is working, ADPS will too. The only difference, is if you choose to use the cloaked or hidden links feature of ADPS. This is outlined in the manual, but you simply have to place your htaccess file in a different location.
As for loading one merchant per “folder”, that answer is complicated. First of all, nothing is loaded into any folders on your server. ADPS creates content posts which are posted into WordPress just like any other standard content post is. ADPS does allow you to have the posts created in different categories on your WordPress site.
Now it’s important to understand that ADPS is not designed to work with just one merchant. So it will not take every product from a merchant data feed file and post all of those to your website at once like standard data feed scripts will. Instead, it is designed to drip feed your website so that it grows slowly and naturally. It’s also specifically designed to mix products from multiple merchants, so that you will not end up with a thin affiliate site. When you post products from just one merchant data feed file, that creates a thin affiliate sites.
If you want to create WordPress posts from just one merchant in one category you can do this a couple of ways. One way is to simply configure ADPS for just one merchant instead of multiple ones. The second way is to use the filter word feature, and enter your merchant name as the word or phrase to filter on.
For example, ADPS allows you to configure up to five merchant data feeds per site. If you have more than one merchant configured, then when ADPS creates your posts for you, it will create posts with products from all the merchants you have configured. If you want to only post products from one merchant, you can simply have just one merchant configured in the ADPS admin area.
With just one merchant entered into the configuration, the posts which are created will only contain products from that one merchant. If you would like all the products from that merchant to be put into one category, you simply choose the category that you want to posts created in. If you want to go broad, and not create posts with similar niche products, then you would simply leave the filter word phrase box empty. When there is no filter word or phrase entered, ADPS will randomly select products from the merchant feed its configured with.
Alternatively, you can have multiple merchants entered into your ADPS configuration and just use the filter word functionality to have ADPS only select products which have a specific merchant name in them. And of course, you can tell ADPS which category of your site those products should be posted into.
Keep in mind though, that if the merchant feed you are using contains a variety of products such as baby toys, jewelry, and small kitchen appliances, you may end up with posts on your site that have unrelated products in them. You can avoid this of course, by setting your minimum and maximum product amount per post to just one. Putting just one product into each post however, also runs the risk of creating a thin affiliate sites. You can negate this of course, depending on the WordPress theme you’re using since it controls what all is shown on each page of your site.
Hopefully this all makes sense, and hopefully it helps too
if you have more questions, feel free to ask.
Kathy
July 7th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Thanks for your reply and email, Kathy.
Just one question now. Is there a separate FTP Username and FTP password for ShareASale? I couldnt find any reference to it at their site but the plugin has fields for it. I tried my regular login SAS username and password but still failed to get ADPS started last night and today.
Also, it’s 24+ hours since getting merchant approval. Could they be dragging their feet on my request for FTP access? or is it something else?
The error messages I get are:
Warning: ftp_login() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /home1/findgood/public_html/zzz/wp-content/plugins/ADPS2/SAS-FTP.php on line 153
Warning: ftp_pasv() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in /home1/findgood/public_html/zzz/wp-content/plugins/ADPS2/SAS-FTP.php on line 157
Error: Ftp connection has failed!
Attempted to connect to datafeeds.shareasale.com for user xxx”
(where zzz = my hosting account username and xxx = my SAS username).
Gary
July 9th, 2008 at 3:30 am
Kathy, an update.
A bit of Googling shows that others also have had this error message - from different scripts and various web hosts.
So maybe I didnt upload in Ascii the first time (because when I deleted it all and started again, the ADPS fields were all autofilled the second time I activated the plugin).
Or maybe I did it right and the problem is a CPanel setting that varies between hosting providers because I use 2 webhosts and your script is working sweetly on one, while has the above error shows on the other. I sent in a support ticket to the 2nd host and am awaiting their response.
Thought you’d like to know.
Gary
July 9th, 2008 at 5:17 am
Hi Gary,
Couple of quick notes for you:
1. ADPS asks you for your SAS FTP username and password because it has no way of knowing what it is
In most cases this is the same as your SAS web login info, but once in awhile this will be different.
2. The FTP error you’re seeing is normally caused when you don’t have FTP access to SAS yet, but in very rare cases it is a hosting problem. Here’s the couple of reasons it can be caused by the host:
– They have PHP FTP turned off
– They have either outgoing or incoming FTP traffic restricted to specific port ranges (usually incoming)
In the first case you simply ask them to turn ftp functionality on. In the second case, they probably restrict incoming traffic so you’ll want to ask them to allow incoming passive FTP connections from datafeeds.shareasale.com
Hope that helps and glad to hear it’s working on the other host!
Kathy