: Google penalty resulting from duplicate content and backlinks on dealer websites We have a dealer network that sells our products, as a bonus we give them an extra 25% off our products from

@Kevin317

If you are worried about duplicate content, then asking affiliates to use the canonical tag would work.

I personally suspect any penalty will be more about the links. If it was duplicate content, then your affiliates would also have been hit (well, whichever Google chose as canonical would do fine, and the others would be pushed down the rankings).

Google's page on handling affiliate links isn't actually that helpful.. support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76465?hl=en
They seem to ignore the fact that affiliate marketing is common - large sites like Amazon and Ebay both allow users to sell from their own websites.

Looking into how Amazon handle it, they host the content and get their affiliates to link to it via an iframe. That's probably more about ease-of-setup, but would be one way of keeping the content hosted on your site only.

Nofollowing the links would show that it isn't intended as a link scheme.

Finally, if the links are only there for Google and you have no intention of getting real customers via them, then you should probably just remove them altogether.

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@Candy875

Start by making those backlinks nofollow in your snippets and tell your dealers to make them nofollow too. Your way of creating backlinks is now considered illegitimate. You will not recover the rankings your used to have through them, unfortunately.

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