Excerts from Google reviewer guidelines
 

Exceptions (Scraped Content that is not Spam) Lyrics, poems, ringtones (that the user programs rather than downloads), quotes, and proverbs have no central authority. When you see pages with this content, you cannot judge it to have been copied, and the pages should not be assigned a Spam label. Unfortunately, some content is written specifically for Spam pages and you will not find it on another source.

Although you may be convinced that the intent is to deceive, if the content makes sense and appears original, you will not be able to label such pages Spam.


and this on the same page:

thin affiliate is a page that exists to deliver a visitor to a page on another domain with a different owner. Keywords deliver visitors to the affiliate page, and links on the affiliate page deliver visitors to the second page, which is owned by a real merchant.
This is a revenue-sharing situation in which the thin affiliate is paid a commission by the real merchant for any activity generated on the merchant?s site. Usually the activity will be a sales transaction, such as a product purchase or a hotel booking. The thin affiliate site contains text and perhaps images copied from the merchant site. It offers no (or very little) value-added service while earning its commission. The thin affiliate may also earn PPC revenue by providing PPC links on its page.





Anyone have the full guidelines?

Google hates affiliate sites indeed, they think of any type of affiliate site as spam filling up their SERP's with duplicate content. i'd like to see the full guidelines also

good info, bump for more

interesting, where did you get this?

one of the most interesting things i've seen posted here in years :thumbsup

Thanks for the info!

Thanks, found what appears to be full document at URL below ...

http://www.mauriziopetrone.com/blog/...lines-2007.pdf

good stuff

great find, thx!

Yet they sure as hell don't mind selling adds to affiliate sites all over their search results.. They are fucking hypocrites.

That is pathetic. Sure, there's plenty of spammy gateway pages with affiliate links but also legitimate review sites that depend on commission sales.

Guess you'll have to cloak your links in order to avoid penalization.

Thanks for the links.. will be reading that PDF.. (even though I hate PDF's with a passion)

According to the PDF, it fortunately appears like they draw a distinction between a thin affiliate and a legitimate review site.

Thanks..