Affiliate sites

I hope this is the right forum for this question...didn't find anything closer to the mark.

At what point would you consider a site to be an affiliate site?

In other words, if a site claims to offer goods or services but the goods and services are actually offered by a re-directed site, isn't that an affiliate site?

For example, is a site offers rental cars, but the actual renting of the car is redirected to a real rental-car site which actually processes the rental...is the original site an affiliate?

Yes, both of the cases that you describe are forms of affiliation. And they are both not information but deceit and disinformation.

But affiliation is only one of many forms of plagiarism--and affiliation is not disallowed because it's forbidden; it's disallowed because it conflicts with basic ODP goals. It is IMPOSSIBLE for such a site to provide unique, authoritative content. Only the actual business HAS the unique content; only the actual business can authoritatively declare what it does or does not offer.

And, taking the example you use a bit further, if the site were Joe's Travel Agency, at the corner of 5th and Main, and the website had an abundance of unique content about Joe, his staff, the history of the family business, testimonials, first person narratives from trips, etc. the fact that it also offers some affilaite content would not automatically cause the site to be removed. The editors would have to determine: tif tehy could magically remove the affilaite content, would the site stand on its own merits; and to what degree does the affilaite content make sense in the overall context of the website.

Good ???

Think of it this way. The affiliate content is irrelevant. Just irrelevant. If we can ignore and blank it out, we do that, and review the rest of the content. If it is difficult enough to get past the advertising content, then -- or if it's obvious that the primary purpose of the site is the advertising content, then ... reject.

It's usually easy to tell when a site's primary purpose is advertising. For instance, it's a dead cert when the webmaster asks, over and over again, how much advertising is allowed, without ever showing any interest in informational content.