There are a number of services out there that promise to deliver additional traffic and revenue through taking content from your product feed and creating new pages, but in actual fact – using these services could lead to you losing a huge proportion of your existing organic traffic.
Basically, when you sign up to one of these services, they usually ask you to point a section of your website to their servers, which they will then control. They will then take your product feed and list all of the products within this section. They usually add lots of content from different sections of the feed to the pages with the intention of generating more long-tail traffic. They then take a set percentage of any revenue generated (from people accessing their section of the website) as commission.
The problem with these services…
So, basically you are adding lots of new pages to your website without any additional unique content (because the feed content is likely to be featured on other websites and potentially other areas of your website) – significantly increasing the levels of low quality pages on your domain. Adding a service like this (there are plenty of them) leaves you highly susceptible to the Google Panda update, which targets websites with a large proportion of low quality pages and also duplicate content (as well as other things).
Most of these services suggest that they are not detrimental for SEO – however Google representatives will dismiss them if they’re asked and if you read up on the Google Panda update, it basically does everything that is recommended you shouldn’t do.
Although these services probably will artificially generate you some revenue to start with (most likely subtracting from other pages), it’s only a matter of time before you get hit.
I would strongly recommend against these services – if you have any questions about this, feel free to get in touch via my contact form.
