WebFusion - 3:57 pm on Oct 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

All I can say is that you have cost yourself a heap of search engine traffic and probably some good affiliates.

On the contrary, our organic traffic (especially from Yahoo) has returned and/or begun returning.

I think you may misunderstand. Our system creates links for the affiliates that look like this:

[oursite.com...]

Which, of course, makes them look like a normal page, but also (unfortunately), caused some duplicate content isssues, as the regular page looks like:

[oursite.com...]

While we do everything we can to supprt our affiliates, you can't possibly expect us to accept a duplicate content penalty jsut so a few can have their affiliate ID'd pages in the SERPS.

At any rate...we promote our program MUCH differently than most merchants in that we forbid search engine spamming, and actually limit who we accept into our program. Considering our conversion rates exceed 2.5%, our affiliates who do "play by our rules" are VERY happy ;-)