The problem with data feeds is fact that a lot of affiliates use same copies of feeds in same exact ways. Most data feed affiliates put just product names in HTML titles, so they all end up with a bunch of similar pages that have identical titles. And since search engines give a lot of weight to titles of HTML pages, those affiliates end up competing with each other for same highly specific keywords.

Luckily, this problem has a quick and dirty solution. It's worse than going over feed by hand, but much better than doing nothing. What I get from affiliates is that manually modifying feed simply defeats purpose. But being able to do it automatically can help one differentiate his site from other affiliates without losing benefits of using data feeds.

There are two basic ways to automatically make your site a little bit different from other affiliates of same merchant.

The first way is to add some keywords before and/or after product name in HTML title. For example, let's say you pick a phrase "On Sale" to add after product name. So instead of "Blue Widget #MN-3143" you have in original data feed, you would now have "Blue Widget #MN-3143 On Sale" in HTML title of that product page. You simply add that phrase to titles of all products in 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 product name to have something like "Cheap Blue Widget #MN-3143." The keywords you pick largely depend on merchant's product line.

Another variation of this technique is to randomize keywords that are displayed before and after product names in 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 name of a product to form title for page. Your scripts would pick a new keyword for each request for 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 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 -- ones looking for bargains as well as 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 product names, you can try changing names on a large scale. As I said earlier, modifying feeds by hand would defeat purpose of using them. But if you perform a find-and-replace operation on 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 -- stream editor. I'm going to skip much of 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 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.