Lately it seems there has been an increase in datafeed driven/affiliate content sites out there. I myself have made quite a few. How search engines are going to eventually treat these sites is an important issue that should be discussed.

We all know Google says that duplicate content is a "don't" and as such you risk being banned or penalized for doing it. But what exactly is duplicate content? It isn't just affiliate datafeed sites, such as those using Amazon AWS, that have duplicate content. People often create sites using feeds from Wikipedia and DMOZ, is this duplicate content? You could find a press release from Tivo on thousands of news, financial, or electronics websites. Is that duplicate content? What about game cheat sites that all list the same cheats? How is Google going to figure out what types of duplicate content to ban or punish while leaving other types alone? Other than with manual review, is it even possible? Datafeed driven sites are only going to increase in number., search engines will have to do something.

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