Affiliates are spamming

One of my client's online Business has affiliates. Now some affiliates were using duplicate keyword rich content which when the affiliate network found out, they banned those websites. But some of those pages which have duplicate content on them have unfortunately been indexed by Google and they are still linking to our client's website.

Would this harm my client's website?

I think it would. According to the latest Google algorithm, websites that has low Page Rank which links to your website may also devalues your site. Especially if the affiliates websites are banned from Google index.

Jenny.Mini

I would like to hear a more carefully worded and more detailed description of the problem. Are you talking about verbatim duplication of articles? How long are they? How many? Is the entire page content duplicated? Entire site duplicated? Do the articles appear verbatim on both affiliate site and program site?

The content was copied verbatim. There were around 10 or so pages and each page had approximately 150 to 300 words. But now my client has confirmed that the affiliates have completely removed all links and pages which were spamming.

So I think the spamming by affiliates for a short period would not hurt my client's website. Or will it?

If the affiliates have verbatim content on their site and their site is more powerful than your program site then their copy of that content could be the one selected by the search engines to display.

When dupe content exists google filters copies as they realized that it is duplicated. The most powerful copy is normally the one that ranks highest and stays in the SERPs. Less powerful copies are filtered.

OK. That makes sense. That means there is no real danger of being "banned" because of it.

I doubt that a site would be banned for dupe content as long as there are no copyright problems complained about.

I have quite a bit of authorized duplicate content on one of my sites. As long as I have a link into it from a PR7 page it outranks the publisher. But if I move the link to a less powerful page I am the one that gets filtered.