(Entry was posted by Alistair Lockhart on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 10/01/2020).

SEO Question on Affiliate Product Feeds

Question on Affiliate Product FeedsNot done this before. If youâ€™re going to import a product feed from the likes of Amazon/AWin (into a WP site) can you optimise the product copy (for longtail SEO purposes) when it comes in and before it goes live, or are you stuck with whatever copy is provided by the Advertiser? Thanks in advance. Alistair

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Michael Martinez: You must read the terms of service provided by each API source.

However, in my experience with several providers, the TOS usually allow you to integrate their protected copy into larger documents/pages. So you can usually write your own copy around their copy.
Neil Cheesman: As Michael has said above... BUT... if editing a large number of products you will need to make sure that when the product or product set is updated it doesn`t overwrite your changes.
Alistair Lockhart: Neil Cheesman Michael Martinez Thanks both ðŸ‘ðŸ»
Neil Cheesman: Alistair Lockhart I have done editing etc as the descriptions in some of the product feeds weren`t complete - but the default in updating seems to be to overwrite, so may need tweaking with some code.
Alistair Lockhart: Neil Cheesman Thatâ€™s an excellent point. No good investing time in some lovely longtail copy to find the next day it has been overwritten! ðŸ¤¯
Michael Martinez: I remember trying to work with 1 merchant`s feed for about a year, maybe 2 years. They broke the feed every month when they updated the product information. It was so malformed I had to manually edit the feed code so that my scripts could extract the data.

If the feed is correctly formatted you can get a lot of data up onto a site quickly, but you`re trusting that the information is accurate and sometimes it`s not.

Sometimes it`s more work than it`s worth. Assess the return on investment periodically. It`s sometimes better to walk away from the relationship than to maintain it if it`s wasting your time and resources.