^ Good summary of this extensive discussion!

Not only can that easily look like a link network - which will get you penalised by all the search engines - but I don't see the point in doing such a thing.

Why would you not want to build authority directly to your website - post that sort of information and product reviews to your main domain.  If the content is useful to people, they will link to it and perhaps share it on social networks.

That means all the "strength" from those shares and links will be going straight to your domain, not some sham micro-site.

The SEO companies you've spoken to are just promoting the idea of setting up a website to get some authority so it looks like you have an authority "link" to your site.  Why you wouldn't want to build authority directly to your site to begin with is lost on me.

Unless they're talking about setting up a micro site with relevant content that they can spam the hell out of with some unsavoury tactics that you wouldn't "want to risk on your main site".  So you're micro-site acts as a buffer in this sense.

Do you really want to rank in that way?

I'm much more interested in doing things in an open and tangible way.  Produce the best content that you can and promote it as much as you can.  Get legitimate authority straight to your site.  That's not to say that marketing your content won't be easy - it can be a long and difficult process to get traction.  But the rewards are infinitely better if you do.

Hi there

Assuming that the affiliate URL points to the same page (http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar), so there is only one page that exists, then adding a rel=canonical tag should fix this problem.

On the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecarpage, add this code to the tag:

rel="canonical" href="http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar" />

This will tell Google that any other versions of this page should not exist and that the http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar page is the original that should be ranked.  It is considered a strong signal (not a rule) by Google, but I've very rarely seen it not work.

Now, if the affiliate URL actually goes to a duplicate version of the page (so there are 2 pages), I would simply add some meta data to tell Google not to index the page.  You can do that with this in your page's code:

Hope this helps to answer your question.

Hi Tiberiu

No, a site won't be penalised because it has the same site structure, design or architecture as another site.  For example, I've worked with a number of companies that have multiple websites for different countries.  To establish brand consistency and awareness, the designs are all kept the same.

Of course, your website might get penalised if it contains duplicate content, so obviously it's important to ensure all your content is unique before launching.  Google may also look negatively on your site if it contains a lot of ads above the fold, or tries to use ad-space too aggressively, so be wary of this.

Hope this helps!