Is Affiliate Duplicate Content?

[KasperK]

Hi moz fans!
I'm working on some client sites.
They have a lot of products, which they are selling through their webshop and two affiliate sites.
But I can't stop wondering:
The affilate sites are using the same product descriptions and images - Will Google see that as duplicate content?
And if so.. How can I prevent that?

The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing.. Is there some way I can check it?

When I do a google search, whit the "My product description text", I'm getting some different results:

• Sometimes all three sites appear (main site, and affilate)
• Sometimes it's only the affilates
• Sometimes it's only the main site.

So to make it short:
If i'm using affliate, will Google see it as duplicate content?
How do I check it, and how do I prevent it?

Thank you!

[EGOL]

The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing...

Lots of affiliates are really smart people.  They often have websites that are much more powerful than the vendors that they sell for.  The result of that is that their sites will often displace the program site in Google search results - because they are more powerful.

Lots of people say that people who copy your content will not outrank you, but those folks need to upgrade their knowledge.  If your content is published on more powerful sites or lots of less powerful sites you can be outranked or filtered from the SERPs.

If you tell these folks to take down what is currently published on their website or point rel=canonical to your site you run the risk of them refusing or taking your product off of their page and replacing it with your competitors product.

The best way to fix this is to look towards the future and have rules for all new affiliates that they must not republish content from your website.   That will reduce the number of affiliates that you acquire and you run the risk of them writing really bad content that misrepresents your product.

Affiliates can be your strongest ally or your strongest competitor.  Tread carefully.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

Google will count this as duplicate content, regardless of 'affiliate' status or not. You've got a few options here:

1. Have the affiliates canonicalize to your client's URLs
2. Require them to write their own unique product descriptions
3. You could (or have the client) write unique descriptions for the content on the client site

I think option 3 is the most viable, since you won't have to ask the affiliates to make any operational changes.