Best procedure for distributing identical content about your company/site for affiliates to use?

[Martin_S]

When dealing with affiliate websites, whereby you send them a stock standard bio or info on your company for them to use on their sites, what is best practice?

Is is OK to have multiple websites all linking to you with pages that contain the same content? Should I ask them to implement canonical or no-index tags for those particular pages? Should I ask them to rewrite the content (which may be impractical or they're unwilling to do)?

Thanks

[SEODinosaur]

Definitely** do something, you do not want duplicate content.** You can always trackback to the original content or use a rel=canonical tag.

[Martin_S]

So it's for the affiliate to implement the canonical as we're the originating source?

[SEODinosaur]

Well a trackback is to avoid duplicate content penalties for an external site with the same content.

A canonical is internal to your site. So if you want to have two pages with the same url and avoid duplication and still pass link juice you would use a rel=canonical tag.

This should clear it up for you as it did for me : )

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes

[Everett]

I usually instruct affiliate managers to write their own company bio and/or product descriptions for affiliates to use. Treat every single piece of content on your site as if it were an asset, because it is.

You can have 2,000 affiliates linking to you (though their links should probably be nofollowed) from within the same company bio or product description as long as that is not ALSO the same company bio or product description you use on your site. If they all want to share content that's their problem. Just don't let them share YOUR content.