Part I 

First of all I would like to welcome you to SEO Affiliate Marketing.   Secondly I would like to clarify that “aggressive seo” and “affiliate marketing” are two separate things.  As an affiliate you can do aggressive seo and make fast money but it does have its drawbacks like being regularly banned from the engines.  IMHO aggressive seo is getting to be as difficult as rocket science.  If you have it 90% correct, it will not work.  The search engines continue to become more sophisticated.  It is harder to do aggressive seo without triggering a quality filter set up by the search engines. 

Affiliate sites don’t have to break search engine guidelines to make money.  For example the BBC has affiliate links and they do not violate search engine guidelines.  There are many review sites earning good money that compare and contrast the top merchants.  If you want your site to survive longer just make it unique and try to have something valuable for users.  If you choose the safer path of following the SEO guidelines that the search engines publish it will take longer to rank. 

Both ways can be profitable if you understand what you are doing and do make make assumptions.  Be smart. 

Part II

Don’t be paranoid.  Search engines penalize and ban sites that do not have unique content regardless if they are affiliate sites or not.  Many people think the engines are biased against affiliates because it seems a higher percentage of affiliate sites seem to be penalized and banned.  What is really happening is that affiliate programs provide tools that make it very easy to republish product feeds. 

Inexperienced affiliates assume this is a good easy way to publish a big site with lots of content.  Most experienced affiliates know this is a bad way to go, since your site will be banned because you just republished identical content which has already been published a 1000 times already.  

If you are going to use product feeds make sure to splice it in with original content.  For example add your own review for every product.  It is not enough to add 5 words, you need to add a significant percentage of text to the product feed to avoid being labeled as duplicate content.

Part III 

If you want to have a long-term site that you can sell later take a moment and ask yourself what is new, different or valuable with your affiliate content that no other site has?  Do you have custom reviews, unpublished data sheets or personalized instructions that no one else has?  If you want your site to have resell power make sure your site is better than the merchants site and has a reason to survive.

To help make your site unique :

• Search government sites (no copyright issues).  Find content that is not exposed to search engines and expose it.
• Hire some cheap college kids to write their point of views of a product
• Include the latest industry news (rewritten of course by your assistant)
• Hang out on related forums and find out what questions people are posting about your merchant.  Then post the ultimate FAQ on your site.
• Accept unique articles for your industry in exchange for linking back to the author
• Compare and contrast all the merchants in an industry
• Test the customer support of the merchants and then write up the results
• Hire a freelance writer to translate the instruction manual from geek speak to human
• Create an industry directory with free inclusion as long as they provide an original 500 word company description
• Buy your content rich competitors website

Good luck!