We operate a retail site and about a year ago we developed an affiliate program where you could purchase a site from us and be paid an affiliate fee for the sales from that site. The data base for the two servers is unique (though identical) to each server. The Graphics layout is the same however the graphic and the site colors are unique to each affiliate site. Our original site is hosted on its own server, has its own unique url and Ip address. The other affiliate sites are hosted on a totally different server with unique IP addresses. We originally let the affiliate sites be released to the search engines because our affiliates were paying for their own site on the Internet. We found this was a problem as they each came into the search engine rankings because the search engines actually hid the duplicate site listings alpabetically and this forced our main site not to show up many times. Based on that result we started rejecting the spiders on the affiliate sites however we still have many listings still there after 6 months.
I'm looking for some accurate feedback as to whether our main site has now been affected or labeled a mirror site as our Google traffic has recently dropped radically. Does anyone have any information that would help? Does anyone have a recommendation as how to fix this?