Duplicate content concerns with our partner areas.

[financialhost]

We have a slight problem. We have several large partners who like to sell our widgets.

The deal we make with them is to allow them to have their own template surounded by our content. In return they link to this from their websites.

We set up their partner areas on our own site.

www.oursite.com/partnerid2/

We also swap links - www.oursite.com - link to www.partnersite.com - www.partnersite.com link to www.oursite.com/partnerid2/ .

That way we both get more traffic and make more money.

Since our partner areas on oursite are 87% similar, i am greatly concerned that we might get flanked for duplicate content even though the links are based at our URL.

On the other hand, i have been playing with the idea of setting a cookie from the url refereer field to allow links from our partners to go straight to our main url but to still allow them the branding their require around our content.

So www.oursite.com would look like www.oursite.com/partner/ when someone clicked from their site - even though the URL would still be www.oursite.com. Obviously the spiders would only see our design at www.oursite.com not our partners, stopping duplicate content concerns.

How would the search engines see this technique? I am worried that may feel we are cloaking.

What is the lessor of two evils here?

Any comments , suggestions appreciated.

[Thermit]

I don't think you need to worry about dupicate content penalties unless you actually have 100% duplicate pages.

Much content on the net is duplicate, and there are no problems seen.

Just remember it is very easy to create a checksum to check for duplicate pages, but much trickier to actually implement a reasonable duplicate content filter. Problem is many pages on some sites are very similar, although it's the nav and such that is duplicate, instead of the content.