Affiliate meta refresh link stole my home page

[coco]

I’m looking after a client site in a very competitive market. I take care of the site SEO, while the client employs several affiliates to bring in extra traffic. Couple of days ago I noticed the site had dropped completely out of the index for the core phrase. But noticed my title and description ranking in the top 20 under another URL. This was an affiliate link, which used a 1 second meta refresh to link to our home page. Google had indexed the content under the affiliate URL, and demoted the page under our URL for being a duplicate. When I search for the unique text on the home page, the affiliate link shows up, but my home page doesn’t. The only way to see that is to remove the duplicate content filter.

I can see what has happened, but should it?

[takagi]

This is a problem some other members also had.

My affiliate redirect to my page on Google result! [webmasterworld.com].

and

[webmasterworld.com...]
(giving an error now about login?)

[Spannerworks]

Thanks takagi. guess a stricter T&C's for affiliates seam to be the way to go. Still find it disturbing that anyone with a high PR page can get any of your lower PR pages listed under their URL, regardless of affiliation.

[g1smd]

Google seems to like to list the site with the biggest "reach".

Their site points to their own and to yours. Your site does not point to theirs.

A visitor arriving at their site can visit their site and your site. A visitor arriving at your site can only visit your site.

Google lists the one with biggest spread.

For many months Google listed a one paragraph page pointing to a new site rather than the whole site itself.