That means affiliates who want to effectively compete on Google needs to add new, fresh and targeted content to their site or risk vanishing into a black hole. Of course, every good affiliate wishes they had unique content, but acquiring it isn't easy.

While plenty of sources exist to acquire content that can't be changed, there are very few that allow affiliates to modify articles and make them unique and specific for their site.

So what's an affiliate to do? Well, they can write and develop their own content, but generally few affiliates have the time or desire to do so. They can pay for it to be produced by freelance writers associated with networks like Elance or by a professional copywriting services such as InfoSearch Media.

Some affiliates are lucky enough to get content from their merchants. That usually stops when the merchants realize that wide distribution of its own content is a short-term gain. The value of content is often diluted and degraded because it has been repeated and copied to a point where the merchant has no control of it.

Others use free content sites such as Article City and ARA content. The content doesn't cost anything, but it can't be edited or changed, and in most cases must also retain links and credits to the author as well as the source site.

One solution to the problem is to have merchants develop content specifically for their affiliates – no credits required, no back links requested (other than affiliate-tracked and tagged ones), the right to edit, cut, slice, dice the content in any way to make it unique.

In this niche of open license content there are currently only a handful of players. Wikipedia, while not a merchant, does allow articles to be rewritten, but there are a fair number of requirements as part of the use. AMWSO also has a copy development service for its merchants.

Still, at the end of the day, each individual affiliate will still need to sit down and work out how a plan to make the content unique to them – especially if they want to be buddies with Google.