Anyone Have Any Experience With Catch Marketing?

[eTundra]

I was recently approached by Catch Marketing about a service they provide that uses a product data feed to create hundreds of pages with "unique" (algorithm generated) content on a subdomain of a website targeting long-tail keywords not already driving traffic to the site.

It's an affiliate type setup with a commission-based fee structure.

Admittedly not the most elegant solution to driving long-tail keyword traffic but my company is short on resources and long on revenue goals.

I'm not really interested in hearing about creating awesome unique content written by a human as the better solution here; although I understand and aspire to those ideals the reality is that I have 60,000 products to market and I'm the only one who writes product content - after I tend to my other responsibilities.

Has anyone used or heard of this service?  Your feedback appreciated.

[TakeshiYoung]

I haven't heard of this specific company, but I have done something similar with on-site search results on my own sites. It's also standard practice for many comparison shopping sites. If you abuse it too much you risk the Panda penalty, but if you have a high pagerank and not enough content, it can be a great way to get more traffic.

[eTundra]

Thanks for your reply Takeshi.

Two things I like about this approach over a CSE is that first they are going to rework product names/page titles/URLs to target different from the long tail keywords my products already attract traffic for and second they are going to give me full Analytics access so I can see exactly which keywords are driving traffic/conversions.

[TakeshiYoung]

Yes, I was saying that many CSEs do something similar, i.e. they take product feeds and use templates to generate thousands of content pages which they fill in with details of the products (product titles, specs, images, etc).  Bonus points if you add spinning and randomization to increase the uniqueness of your content.  It's a decent scalable content strategy, but can get you penalized by Panda if they consider the content to be too "thin".

[eTundra]

Makes sense.  Thanks again!

[Everett]

The Back Burner,

I think Takeshi gave a great response though I can't officially endorse it because I wouldn't officially endorse the strategy. When someone says "at risk of the Panda penalty" you need to take that very, very seriously. I've worked with comparison shopping engines (CSEs) and even eCommerce sites that have tried similar solutions in the past. What you're talking about here are doorway pages and are clearly against webmaster guidelines from any major search engine.

If you and the person who owns the company understands the risks and have weight the potential benefits than you are obviously free to do as you please. But you may think about your coworkers and the fact that a lot of businesses have gone under completely, and a lot of people have lost their jobs, because the SEO decided to take a risk like this.

OK enough of the disclaimer talk. You asked if anyone has used that particular service. I have not, so I'll butt out now.

We would love to hear about the results a year from now if you think to check back.

[OfficeFurn]

Hi Kasy,

I'm curious - did you sign on with Catch Marketing?

Thanks.

[eTundra]

Heather,

We didn't end up going with Catch Marketing; in fact, it was a predecessor of mine that originally posted this and our company did end up going with another company that does something quite similar.  I've always seen this as bad practice - doorway pages.

One of the first things I did when I started here was get those pages taken down - it just seems way to risky for a company like ours (or any for that matter).  We have more than 60k products online, and to do something shady like this is going to end up doing more harm than good.

Anyways, since we took those pages down within the month, I haven't seen any changes really, but I think there are also a lot of other things we need to fix to get things right again - ho-hum.