Be Careful of Affiliate Programs

Chris Nelson, from Google's search quality team, put out a post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog telling users to be careful of having sites that are affiliate sites with no original content.

Scraped content (content that has been copied and pasted from another site) is a big problem and Google penalizes sites if they are caught displaying scraped content with no reference to the original site.

We know that Google puts high importance on the quality of content on a site and this is just a reminder about that. Google wants you to only have content that adds quality to your site and your audience.

If your site syndicates content that’s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: "Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content?
- Chris Nelson

Read the full Affiliate Programs and Added Value post at Google's Webmaster Central Blog.