Product data feeds are really popular among affiliates because
they can help produce thousands of product pages quickly and
easily. Such pages can be used to drive highly targeted search
engine traffic looking specifically for those products. But there
is a big problem.
The problem with data feeds is the fact that a lot of affiliates
use the same copies of feeds in the same exact ways. Most data
feed affiliates put just the product names in HTML titles, so
they all end up with a bunch of similar pages that have identical
titles. And since the search engines give a lot of weight to
the titles of HTML pages, those affiliates end up competing with
each other for the same highly specific keywords.
Luckily, this problem has a quick and dirty solution. It's worse
than going over the feed by hand, but much better than doing
nothing. What I get from affiliates is that manually modifying
feed simply defeats the purpose. But being able to do it
automatically can help one differentiate his site from other
affiliates without losing the benefits of using data feeds.
There are two basic ways to automatically make your site a little
bit different from other affiliates of the same merchant.
The first way is to add some keywords before and/or after the
product name in the HTML title. For example, let's say you pick
a phrase "On Sale" to add after the product name. So instead of
"Blue Widget #MN-3143" you have in the original data feed, you
would now have "Blue Widget #MN-3143 On Sale" in the HTML title
of that product page. You simply add that phrase to the titles of
all products in the feed. That lets you specifically target
people who would search for "blue widget on sale" or "mn-3143 on
sale."
You can also use some arbitrary keywords like "Cheap" or
"Discounted" or "Quality" before the product name to have
something like "Cheap Blue Widget #MN-3143." The keywords you
pick largely depend on the merchant's product line.
Another variation of this technique is to randomize the keywords
that are displayed before and after product names in the titles.
You can use a sever-side technology of your choice to pick a
random keyword out of some predefined list and append it to the
name of a product to form the title for the page. Your scripts
would pick a new keyword for each request for the product page.
Of course, that would only work if you are using a database, and
do not generate static HTML using Webmerge or a similar program.
That way, even though you don't control the exact keyword that
is displayed for any particular page, with enough product pages
you can cover a wider market of people searching with different
modifiers. You should be able to cover different shopper types --
the ones looking for bargains as well as the ones looking for
quality.
The second way to make your site different from others is a bit
more complex, but could yield much greater results. Instead of
adding something to the product names, you can try changing the
names on a large scale. As I said earlier, modifying feeds by
hand would defeat the purpose of using them. But if you perform a
find-and-replace operation on the whole file then you can get
different content without spending much additional time.
The utility you might want to use for feed modification is called
sed. You can search for that name using you favorite search
engine. It's sed -- the stream editor. I'm going to skip much of
the technical detail on how and why it does certain things in a
certain way. Instead, I will concentrate on describing practical
application of sed with product feeds.
At its core, sed takes input data, modifies it according to
certain rules and outputs the result -- all done line-by-line.
It uses regular expressions and can perform extremely complex
operations, by for now I just want to concentrate on simple
replacements.
The good thing about sed is it can use an external file with
multiple commands and execute them one after another for the
entire input file (in our case, it's a product feed). So you can
replace as many words as you need. Also, once you define those
commands, you can use them for many different feeds with
different merchants.
Let's go over a few examples that should illustrate the true
power of this approach.
I'll assume that the merchant we are working with sells widgets
of various kinds. You looked over the feed and saw that the
merchant has some porcelain widgets; red and blue, large and
small. One of the synonyms for porcelain is ceramic, so first
thing you would do is replace the word porcelain with ceramic in
all product names and descriptions.
This can be done by adding the following commands to a sed script
file before running it against the feed:
s/porcelain/ceramic/g
s/Porcelain/Ceramic/g
Those commands will replace your keywords while preserving
capitalization. So that a title like "Big Blue Porcelain Widget"
becomes "Big Blue Ceramic Widget."
To make things more interesting, let's assume that the feed
already has some ceramic widgets aside from the porcelain ones.
So you do not want to end up with just one kind. Instead, you
want to switch them around. Remember, your goal is to be as
different from the original feed as possible.
You can achieve that with the following set of commands:
s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/ceramic/porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g
In the example above, I used MYTEMPKEYWORD as a place-holder.
That let us make sure that we are not losing the original
keywords.
What happens there is:
all "porcelain" is changed to "MYTEMPKEYWORD'
then
all "ceramic" is changed to "porcelain"
then
all "MYTEMPKEYWORD" (which used to be the original porcelain) is
changed to "ceramic"
and then the same thing should be done for all capitalized
keywords.
You can use anything in place of MYTEMPKEYWORD as long as it does
not already appear in the feed. You want to use some unique
keyword.
Once you are done with those keywords, you can change something
like "Metallic" to "Shiny Metal Finish" -- assuming that makes
sense for a given product line.
Adding that to a command file would give you:
s/porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/ceramic/porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/ceramic/g
s/Porcelain/MYTEMPKEYWORD/g
s/Ceramic/Porcelain/g
s/MYTEMPKEYWORD/Ceramic/g
s/Metallic/Shiny Metal Finish/g
s/metallic/shiny metal finish/g
That would also change "Blue Metallic Widget" to "Blue
Metal-Looking Finish Widget."
As I said earlier, you can add as many commands as you want for
different words and phrases. And with enough such small changes,
you will be able to reach traffic that is not already covered by
your competing affiliates. While a few hundred affiliates with
their data feed sites might be displayed for a keyword "blue
porcelain widget" -- there might be just a few (if any) covering
"blue ceramic widget" for the same merchant.
Even something like
s/TV Set/Television Set/g
along with diagonal sizes and brand names might help you stand
apart from the rest of the affiliates who use the same feed. Any
change is better than having the same exact content as others.
I encourage you to download a copy of sed and check it out. Once
you get a hang of it, you will be able to automate the whole
process. And if you are already using scripts to refresh
merchants' feeds and rebuild sites automatically, then you can
plug sed in the middle and modify feeds on the fly.
Also, if you are having a hard time coming up with words to
replace, you might want to check out Princeton's WordNet. You can
even download the word database and use it locally on your
desktop.
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