Dealing with Spammy Affiliate Site Copies

[TheCraig]

We have a longstanding site that sells media files with a large number of digital products.

We offer a referral program with rewards for those that tell others about us.

In the last year, we have seen some sites popping up primarily in China that appear to be spammy looking advertisement based copies of our own site with product pages that link back to our actual products using a referral link/code.  (no-follow links.)

These sites started popping out more when we noticed that some of their pages were outranking our own actual product pages.

Any thoughts on this?  Our affiliate policy states that the affiliate program is meant to help and not harm our site.  In one sense this is traffic to our site which is supposed to be a good thing, but if these pages are ranking above our own, that is not what we are wanting.  I would bet these pages might get clicked on and due to the spammy nature of these sites, the user bounces and never actually gets to our website.

How would you handle something like this?

Thanks!!

Craig

[ChristopherGlaeser]

Do you have an affiliate application process in place such that you can accept or reject applications?

Best,
Christopher

[jesse-landry]

^ This. Ever look into an affiliate tracking program like Has Offers?

[TheCraig]

Yes, our affiliate system does allow for this if we want it to.  We could pre-review for future affiliates, but the damage is already done in these current cases.  We are talking 2-3 websites here that have probably thousands of pages of our products.

One of the sites is even using the .org version of our domain, but that one actually advertises our competitors products....  uh... yeah....  Not sure how we will deal with this trademark violation with a Chinese website yet, or if there is anything we can do, but it is a pretty serious issue.

The options I see are:

1.  Based on our sign-up terms, we could suspend these affiliate accounts because they violate the terms by providing more harm than good.

2.  These sites do list DMCA notices, so we could actually contact them under the DMCA and tell them to remove our content.

3.  Do nothing, but try to get our pages to rank higher than these pages and consider it just another link to our site.

Thanks for the responses!

Craig

[Everett]

I would do both #1 and #2. If you can contact them and ask them to take the content and links down I would do that as well, documenting the request for future use in the DMCA complaint or in a disavow link request in GWT - if needed.