I recently came across a case of a website design being stolen, where the duplicate site was being used to host affiliate links.

I am presuming, because the site was a top 10 result in Google for a high traffic keyphrase, that the expectation of the copier was that the site would rank for the same phrase and thus gain traffic intended for the original site. 

The problem with that sort of masquerade is that (as anyone with any SEO knowledge knows) the backlinks for a site make up a pretty fair amount of the Google ranking algorithm. It is highly unlikely that just copying the site and hosting it on a brand new domain is going to get you anywhere at all. There are scraper sites out there that steal copy in an attempt to rank high for searches, and partly because of this, there is a duplicate content penalty. Sometimes this creates false positives, and hits the original site as well as the scraper (presumably what has happened to SEO expert Sugarrae). But usually, the engines get it right, and work out correctly which is the originator of the material.

More worrying of course is that the affiliate account was registered at the postal address of the company, which was of course stated clearly on the original site and the duplicate. It is a legal requirement in the UK to have your address details on your website, and has been since January 2007.

We check for duplicate content as part of our managed SEO service, but this is the first time that we have come across anything more than the copy being duplicated elsewhere. Together with the parasitic-spam attacks we were tracking last year, it is becoming more and more part of our SEO remit to be on the look out for nefarious schemes as well as making sure our clients have good positions in major search engines!