Affiliates content sharing
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Quick question:
Is it ok to provide our product descriptions to affiliates?
Ho does this effect our SEO as far as duplicate content issue?
Best Regards
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A common practice is to provide a page for affiliates to access that has unique content, images, banners, etc for affiliates to use. This can be anything from descriptions, to blog posts. Affiliates are pretty busy and appreciate short-cuts, so providing that information to them makes their job easier, and prevents you from the possibility of any duplicate content penalties.
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Let's say you are the affiliate program and I am the affiliate.
You allow me to use the descriptions verbatim from your data feed or from your website.
If I have a site with more authority than yours then my site will probably rank higher in Google SERPs than your site. And, if dozens or hundreds of affiliates republish that same content then your site could be filtered from the SERPs or demoted because of a Panda problem.
From a business perspective your sales will be higher if every affiliate writes his own content, then, although they will be direct competitors for primary search queries they will cover more long tail queries and that results in more sales for everyone.
Unfortunately it is hard to force affiliates to create unique content - especially if there are thousands of products being sold.
Maybe you could incentivize and give a slightly higher commission rate for affiliates who after six months can show you that they have unique descriptions for every product that they are promoting.
Back to your original question. If your affiliates are all using your product descriptions, it would be in your best interest to rewrite and improve the descriptions on your own site and tell the affiliates that they are off limits. Either use the descriptions in the datafeed or write your own for a bonus commission rate.
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