How do I avoid duplicate content on shopping engines & affiliates using my feeds?

Duplicate content can be a big issue with shopping engines and affiliates. You don't want to spend time creating great content and then have Google or other engines think that another site is the originator. This could hurt you in their rankings, and bring users to the shopping engine first rather than your site. This will mean less traffic.

The solution is to provide alternative content to each of the engines. In order for us to feed alternative content to the different services, you have a couple of choices:

1. Load an alternative description in a new property and then configure the feed to use that field instead of the standard caption for the description. This has the one down side - it is a lot of work.

2. The more popular option is to install a dynamic content template. This is a two step process. The first to create the templated description and the second step is to apply it to the description field for each feed.

For step 1, login to the dashboard.

1. Click on My Stores.

2. Click on Edit Settings for your store.

3. Click the edit button in the Additional Settings area. Once there you can load your alternate description, inserting markers where we should insert price, name, and section name if you want it. See below for an example.

Basically our system will replace @name@ with the product name, @price@ with the price, and @section@ with the main section name. Now to apply it to any feed, go back to the My Stores list.

1. Click on your store, and then go to MAPPINGS for any feed.

2. Find the line that would include your caption (look for it in the fields or a field name that makes sense like description) and click on the M on the right under the Modifiers Column. This allows you to create content modifiers.

3. Remove all existing rules except one and change it to USE GENERIC DESCRIPTION.

4. Click save and you're good to go.