I do a limited amount of work with datafeeds on a few of my sites. It’s not my main focus, but I’ve had some fair results from them. But I know a lot of people worry about them resulting in the much feared duplicate content penalty. After all, an unknown number of affiliates, plus possibly the merchant’s site may be using the exact same product information and descriptions.

But you really don’t have to worry that much about duplicate content. Especially if you are willing to put in a little extra work on your datafeed websites.

One of the quickest things to do is a find and replace for some of the descriptive terms. Get out your thesaurus and find different words to use. You will want to make sure that they will still make sense on your site.

If the merchant tends to use a particular phrase or sentence over and over again you can try to think of ways to replace it. Once again, simple find and replace. I sometimes flat out delete the sentence, other times replace it, or if I’m trying really hard, I come up with a couple of variations and switch them around.

Check the spelling too. You don’t want to know how often I come across misspelled descriptions and product names. While there is occasionally an advantage in targeting misspellings, overall it makes you look less professional.

I do all this work with the datafeed in a spreadsheet. This allows me to work on individual columns of the feed without worrying that I will accidentally break a link using the find and replace function.

If you can find a way to allow users to comment on the products, this can be another great way to add something unique to your datafeed sites. It’s a bit of extra programming, and not all premade datafeed scripts will allow it. I’ve been thinking about trying the AffiliStore script, which does not include comments, but has a lot of flexibility otherwise and is free. Just haven’t made the time to make a store with it yet.

The bigger the datafeed is, the harder it is to customize it. However you can do at least some basic things to add at least a touch of uniqueness to your datafeed pages.