Private Label Site and Duplicate Content

[jbernat]

A fulfillment services company has a successful ecommerce web site through which they sell material on behalf of their clients, and are compensated by making a margin on what they sell.

Their web site defaults to the branding theme of their own company, but they can also "skin" the site to match the logo and graphic theme of their client's web site by including a parameter on the url.

Their clients often have very good page rank, so they are likely to benefit from those inbound links to their site in private label mode. Are they realizing any PR benefit with the strategy they are using, however?

How will PR from inbound links be distributed? When in private label mode, all links are generated with the private label parameter to preserve the "mode." Will this effectively keep the PR isolated to the pages having this "mode" url parameter?

How is duplicate content recognized and then dealt with by the engines?

I have considered an option to place a "noindex" meta tag if the private label parameter is present, but will this forfeit any inbound PR benefit from these high-PR inbound links?

Would it make any difference whatsoever if the private labelling was triggered by a different domain name?

Is there a best practices way to implement private labelling of sites for service bureaus?

Thank you!
Jim

[JohnC]

We had a similar situation, building private labeled "skinned" sites for major affiliates. It caused us a slew of problems including duplicate content and affiliate sites getting indexed instead of our site. Our solution was to create a duplicate site on .org and set the robots.txt to disallow all robots on that site. Our primary site is clean and index-able. The affiliates are not going to get SE traffic, but that is not their primary source of traffic anyway. If they want SE traffic, they need to build their own site and not use one of our private label solutions.