Don’t Give Your Affiliates Duplicate Content – Please.

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

A reader at SEOBook asked a good question, “We were thinking of mirroring our website by giving affiliates subdomains with our content like xyz.oursite.com. Is this a good idea or a duplicate content nightmare?”

Aaron Wall gave a good response and it was the same thing I’d have said. Rather than tell you what he said, I’m just going to answer it the way I would.

Duplicate Content For Affiliates Is Bad
If you present your affiliates with the same information you have on your website and in your marketing communications then you are setting them up with duplicate content, which isn’t going to help them and if it doesn’t help your affiliates, it won’t help you. That’s why you should provide your affiliates with marketing tools, but leave the creative content up to them. In other words, banners and code for a variety of marketing icons are good (give them plenty of choices, styles, sizes, colors, etc.). But when it comes to the actual content, allow them to create their own.

What If Affiliates Misrepresent Me?
The obvious follow up question to that is, “What if they misrepresent me or don’t present my product or service in the right way?”

That’s a good question. The answer is they will likely not make a sale, and you won’t either. But people online know that your affiliates are separate from you. You likely do not want the sale if someone was looking for what the affiliate was actually promoting. An illustration would make this point better, I think:

You sell yellow widgets. One of your affiliates markets it as a gold widget. A searcher Googles “gold widgets” and finds your affiliate’s website. It looks pretty, does a good job of preselling, and drives traffic to your website. Ah, but when visitors get to your site they find that those widgets aren’t gold after all – they’re yellow. Now they’ve lost interest. Have you lost anything? No because those visitors weren’t really interested in yellow widgets anyway.

Now let’s say one of your affiliates does a real good job of preselling your yellow widgets. You rank on Page 2 of Google and your affiliate ranks on Page 1 for the key term “yellow widget.” He’s driving traffic to your website like crazy and you are making sales. Every third sale on your website, let’s say, is driven to your site by your affiliate. Are you happy about that? You should be, and your affiliate is likely smiling ear to ear. But the really important thing is that your customers are happy because they’re getting just what they wanted – the best of the best of the yellow widgets.

Affiliate marketing is really just a form of independent preselling. Your affiliates don’t work for you. The work for themselves. But they do sell your product. If they can’t market what you have effectively then they won’t make any money, but you’ll likely still get some recognition from their efforts. You may not make as many sales from their poor marketing, but their poor marketing likely won’t hurt you either. Ditch the duplicate content.