June 5, 2008
Before I get too far into this Niche Store Writer Review, I want to emphasize one main thing… Niche Store Writer is a tool… a tool designed to help affiliate marketers generate keyword rich, somewhat uniquecontent, across many pages of ALREADY DUPLICATED, auto-generated content provided via the eBay rss feed.
Since you are building affiliate websites… I assume you have a goal of spending the least amount of time on producing the best possible results! If so, a tool like Niche Store Writer is invaluable in your toolbox!
If, on the other had, you are building an authority website and using BANS as a method of creating income on that site, you would be foolish to use ANY content generation tool on your site, and while you should still perform BANS page optimization, it should be done manually all the time!
There you have it - in less than 1 paragraph!
If you have several affiliate based niche websites and want to quickly generate page specific, mini-descriptions of your content, Niche Store Writer will work for you!
If your plan is to create fewer websites and balance your monetization with your own unique content, you should skip right past this post…
So… What is Duplicate Content?
According to the Google Webmaster Central blog
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Most of the time when we see this, it’s unintentional or … In some cases, content is duplicated across domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings or garner more traffic via popular or long-tail queries.
Does Niche Store Writer Increase or Reduce Duplicate Content?
The short answer is Both!
Yesterday, in a comment on the post about Adding Relevant Content with Niche Store Writer, I made the statement that sites or pages with a block of NSW text actually generated a LOWER duplicate content percentage than those without! Here is what led me to state that comment…
Baseline Content Duplication Factors
For the purpose of testing, I wanted to check how one of my own sites and two others in the same niche, would be viewed by a search engine to get some baseline duplication figures:
I used the duplicate content comparison tool at: http://duplicatecontent.net/ to check these pages. In order to understand what each metric on the duplicate content checker tool meant, I placed the same block of text in different areas on the same page several times. I have determined that standard text is a comparison of common text blocks on the page, ie; menus, headers, etc. The Smart Text is the text within your content section of the page, or the most important portion! Total text is an average of the two combined. From what I can determine, we want Smart Text and Total text to be as low as possible.
Onsite Duplication of Content
The first test in this Niche Store Writer Review, was to run several of my own site pages through a duplicate content tool, to get an idea of just how similar my site pages are. I have a domain TryBans.com, that I use for testing of different things… so it is perfect for my baseline test. Using the comparison tool at www.Duplicatecontent.net, I compared the following pages on the site:
When looking at the results, I found that all of the comparisons had one very high number in common. The “Smart Text” similarity was in the 90-100% range on all! For the purpose of less typing, I am going to use numbers to represent the site pages: (Ex: If URL1 = 3 I am referring to #3 in the list above)
Conclusion: BANS stores in their “out of the box” format, are full of OnSite duplicate content!
Adding NSW Content to my OnSite Pages
The next test I ran, was to add unique paragraphs to the top and bottom of sample pages 2, 3 & 4, using Niche Store Writer and 6 custom templates I have created. Each template is around 50-100 words and split between the top and bottom of the pages. Ex: “template-1-top” combined with “template-1-bottom” etc.
The results above show that by adding ANY unique content to pages ONSITE, you immediately make those pages stand out from the rest! I also ended up with 6 unique templates that can be reused on different sites, as well as 3 keyword lists for this specific site.
Conclusion: Adding Unique Content to your same-site Store Pages has immediate impact on reducing OnSite duplicate content!
Related Niche Site Duplicate Content
I found a couple BANS sites similar to one of my own, in the same eBay category. The pages used for this sample were:
(All links are set to open in new window, and are rel=no_followed)
If you view all three sites, you will see that they are the same products, same category, same, same, everything… The only real differences are in the layout and color selections by the site owners.
The first step was to set my own pages back to the standard BANS format, no text on top or bottom of the content and use a standard template from BANS. Once I did that, I ran each site page through the duplicate content checker for a baseline comparison:
Then with one of my custom free bans templates used on the site.
The only real blaring thing that stands out in the example above is that the two comparison sites are very much alike in the eyes of a duplicate checking tool! I made sure all pages were refreshed at the time of the check to be sure all were showing similar auctions. The variance in standard text is due to a different template being used!
Conclusion: A Niche Website in the same category as yours, with an out of the box BANS template, still has quite a high percentage of duplicate content! Changing to a custom template will yield an immediate reduction in duplication!
Related Niche Stores AFTER using Niche Store Writer
The nest step in my process was to add the Niche Store Writer content back into my own store page and compare the results again.
First, with a default BANS included template:
Then with a custom template:
The drop in duplicate content was not too noticeable when using the standard templates, approximately 2-5%. But, when using Niche Store Writer and a separate bans template, I was able to make the pages in this test completely stand apart from others in the same niche market in less than 2 minutes, using my saved NSW templates!
Conclusion: Adding NSW or ANY content to your default template BANS site will have a small reduction in duplicate content.
Adding NSW or ANY content to your BANS site with a custom or modified template, shows significant reduction in duplicate content!
But what about a Site Using the Same Template from NSW?
Assuming you are planning to use this like any other tool, you will generate a group of templates and simply paste your keywords in place from your earlier page specific targets. I did the exact thing on one of my abandoned niche stores.
Test results of 2 Separate Sites in completely different niche markets with the no extra text. The first part of the test is to see if there is a significant difference in the niche itself with a standard template from BANS.
Then with a standard template and NSW content on site 1 only.
Then with a custom template and NSW generated content on site 1 only:
Next, both sites using the default bans template same blocks of Niche Store Writer content:
Default template, 2 separate blocks of Niche Store Writer generated content.
Getting there - a different template with the same text blocks as above:
Finally, the comparison of both niche sites, both with custom templates, using 50% unique code blocks from Niche Store Writer templates.
Conclusion:
Conclusion of this Niche Store Writer Review
Now for the trickier part…
When NO custom text is used, two completely separate sites in different niche markets, using the default BANS templates, have a 65% similarity of the most important part of the page, the Smart Text. It would be normal to assume that this number should be much lower due to different markets, but its not.
When adding two separate blocks of NSW template generated content to the same exact pages, the number is reduced to 63%, which results in LESS DUPLICATE CONTENT than doing nothing at all, even in different niche markets!
So… Does Niche Store Writer Save Time?
In the beginning… no! Like any tool, you will need to spend a few hours and develop your initial templates for the tool to work effectively. After you have the templates in place, it gets easier to apply the keywords and copy/paste your content a bit quicker. Overall, you will turn a 10 minute process into a 5 minute process. Over the course of time when you have MANY websites, you will save time!
Biggest Issue: When adding the same blocks of NSW generated content to completely different niche websites and markets, the duplicated content increases to more than 75% in the “Smart-Text” section of your site.
Answer: Use smaller blocks across different domains to avoid exact duplication!
Overall Opinion
Niche Store Writer, in my own opinion, has a great place in our market! It is best used for smaller chunks of text (50-75 words) above and below store pages. By creating a set of templates for “above-listings” and ‘below-listings”, you can then go about mixing and matching those blocks and greatly reduce the duplicate content percentage both OnSite and across different niche websites.
Most importantly, it is a tool to help you deploy large amounts of almost-customized content across MANY pages of already duplicated rss feeds.
For the BEST possible results on any of your BANS niche websites:
I’m sure many of you have fallen asleep by now.. I completely understand! I have a headache myself! Comments are always welcome!
Mark
10 Responses to “Niche Store Writer Review | Dealing with BANS Duplicate Content”
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WOW what a post!!! alot of info …I may have to read twice : )
If you can understand it with only 2 readings, all the power to you!!
During my review, I found all kinds of great info about BANS sites and dup content!!
Kim had to read it 2-3 times… LOL
mark
I was thinking about duplicate content this week as I set up my first BANS store but now I have read your post I will put more urgency into content on the product pages. I had been working on the main store pages and template but time to look at the others.
Thanks for the tip Mark :-)
Thank you! Mark, that was an excellent article with the details I need to know about NSW. I appreciate your time and effort on it!
Mark,
Great article as always, thanks.
So, as I understand it, to keep duplication to a minimum use non-standard BANS templates, have 75-100 words of (product relevant) keyword rich text both above and below the products on every store page.
NSW comes into its own by aiding you in creating the aforementioned 75-100 words.
Did I get that right? :-)
What a great post. I lost count of how many times I read it and I already use niche store writer myself. This is one of the most informative artilces I have found on this program.
I picked up a few handy hints here.
Thanks Mark
Wow! Thanks for this article Mark! I too will re-read it ;) LOL but I get the gist of it now and it’s very informative! *SmiLes* Suzanne
Since their template copies will flag the duplicate content filters and can’t be used, I still feel that you are paying 57 dollars for a basic word processing tool. You can simply do the same thing in Microsoft Wordpad which is free. After you write your original template, simply use the ctrl H keyboard shortcut, type the words you are replacing, and pick the replace all checkbox to substitute the specific keyword within the page. That takes like 10 seconds to replace words in WordPad!
@ Lexi -
I hear exactly what you are saying… thus, preempted the post with the statement about NSW being a tool in your toolbox.
I have only seen the one supplied template with NSW, all others should be written by yourself, for your own use, under your own control… and written to provide useful content to your site visitors.
Like anything, it is not for everyone… if you prefer to write your articles or page content in wordpad, or directly in the editor with BANS, that is your choice. NSW however, does however save time once it is setup and in place, simply a matter of preference…
Mark