I like the idea too.
Theoretically the CAP Certified Partners visit this message board and read the posts. I believe that’s one of the requirements of a CAP certified partner — they’re supposed to be available here to answer questions and deal with affiliate issues. I think this certainly counts as an “issue” worth addressing.
Copying, scamming, and spamming are unacceptable activities. But, I don’t think the search engines give a rat’s ass about copied online gambling content. The online gambling industry is already frowned upon by the Big Two (Y & G), so why would they want to listen to us? Imagine if a porn site complained to Google about copied content. Google would probably laugh in their face. (Of course, online gambling and porn aren’t the same thing, but the comparison sort of illustrates my point).
Therefore, I do think the best way to stop these people is to cut them off at the affiliate level. The key is to filter out the person behind the spam, plagiarism, etc. Blacklist the person (not the website). If the person is banned over and over again, eventually he will run out of “good” affiliates to work with.
Perhaps some kind of blacklist database could be created and shared between the affiliate programs. When you sign up for a program, you have to provide your name and contact information…. I think it would be fairly easy to crosscheck the information against a third-party database of blacklisted webmasters.
Of course there will be some gray areas with this whole thing, i.e. what determines when a webmaster has “crossed the line” with spam, did they really copy so-and-so’s website, or were they actually the victim, etc. But I think there are very obvious examples of spam sites out there right now that could be taken care of immediately. Track ’em down, shut down the affiliate accounts, and start taking names.
I would be interested to hear some affiliate manager opinions about this.