When I do my keyword phrase analysis on the search engines I always see casinos and not casino affiliates in the top ten results. Most if not all of them don't change their content at all. I'm concluding two thing from this.
The first conclusion is that fresh content isn't the most important seo factor. If it was then these casino sites who rarely (if at all) publish new content would be anywhere near the top ten on competitive keyword phrases.
The second conclusion is that inbound links are bar far the single most important seo factor for serp placement. These casinos are throught out time making our job harder by accumulating some major link juice through affiliate banners (both text and graphic).
On every single banner I've seen so far, the casinos are trying to gain link juice. Don't do it. Always add a rel="nofollow" in the link.
The next thing that gets me going are the casinos that have their website name too prominently in the banner. Imagine how many direct type ins they are getting. I like to only promote banners that have the least chance the players will go directly to the browser and type in the casino url directly.
Better yet; place all your banners locally, make a 301 redirect for all affiliate programs with a rel="nofollow" in the url. I suspect that this will also help passively inhibit the casinos direct marketting (no commision for us) and not trigger any potential penalties from the search engines for being "affiliate" or "mirror" websites.
This is common sense and already standard practice for the vets here, but I'd thought I'd share my affirmations.. lol