Risks with sharing my original content with other sites
-
We write our own unique content to our blog a few times a week. The content is written by professionals (doctors and such) and carries a bit of authority.
We periodically get requests from other websites who want to post our content on their blog. We also find that some people will just go ahead and use our exact content (often with a link attribution), without asking permission.
Is there any risk of us not getting credit for being the original source of the content if others use it in its entirety?Are there other risks?
And more importantly, what should we do to make sure we're getting the SEO credit we deserve?
Some ideas which have been discussed that may or may not have credence:
- Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher
- Only let people cite the introductory paragraph, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text)
- Require people to summarize our story, with a link for the full story
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks!
-
Additional to the above points, I would suggest adding Canonical tag to the articles. For major articles you can also use Google Webmaster tools to request Google to fetch and index a page, you have a limited number of these requests, so used them wisely.
-
Sounds like Sage advice!
-
This is what we do, to try to make sure we get credit for our own stories, and it seems to be working:
Connect your G+ profile to your articles.
Add your own profile page to your site.
Link the G+ profile to your own profile page.
google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.
It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.
Here is a short video I made for our writers, to explain how to do it.
-
What are your objectives?
If you have "a message to get out" then you should be sharing your content eveywhere with everybody.
If you are trying to make money and develop a reputation for your site then ask yourself these questions....
- what will happen to my income if ten other sites have each of my articles in the Google index?
- who will get the social sharing for all of my hard work?
- why are these people asking to use my content instead of linking to it or tweeting about it?
The only option that you list that I would do is... "Only let people cite the introductory paragraph sentence, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text)"
Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher.
You publish first and then an authoritative site publishes.... they will outrank you. They will receive your traffic. They will receive your links, likes, tweets, etc. Thanks!
-
All the 3 options are okay. You have to keep in mind, that with the nature of the Internet, you are not really going to be able to control which one of the 3 technique people/other website owners you, so essentially you can't know what people decide to do.
Another oppurtunity would be to implement something like www.repost.us (I saw that discussed here a couple days ago) and when I took a look at it, it looked interesting. Check it out.
I hope that helps. And yes, the most important aspect would be to make sure the content you are adding should be seen by Google on your website/blog 1st. If you are using WordPress or something like that, I would suggest using a plugin to publish and ping to Google an updated XML sitemap as soon as a new article is added. That should so it for you.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Interdomain linking from partner sites
I'm looking for a bit of advice on best practices when it comes to linking domains that are operated by the same umbrella corporation. Are links from the header/footer no longer beneficial? Is there such a thing as too many links among domains? How would you reap the SEO value of a small network of sites that were associated? Thanks!!
Link Building | | ElizaDay0 -
Content Marketing and how it effects Rankings
Hi there everyone! I have what I think is a simple question, but one I can't fully understand the answer to. If I had a homepage that I wanted to optimize for the keyword, e.g. "Second Hand Cars", so I add the keyword in the page title and text etc etc. But I still don't rank well for it. So I turn to content marketing and create some content on my site's blog about new cars, sports cars, and of course second hand cars, with some great content and anchor text pointing back to the home page. Now here's my question, how does creating that content on a blog, or on someone's blog/website help my homepage rank higher for my chosen keyword? Surely it would just help the blog post rank higher? And if someone were to search for "Buy Secondhand cars", wouldn't my hypothetical blog post (with more shares and links than my home page) rank higher than the home page itself? If anyone can clear this up for me I'd be eternally grateful! Thanks in advance Cheers
Link Building | | CD_20160 -
Www.thousandreasons.org - is this an article submitting site?
Hey Guys I was viewing my competitors back-links and I noted that he had a link to www.thousandreasons.org I was somewhat baffled as this site pertains predominantly to USA Newspapers. Can someone please confirm if this is an Article Submission Site?
Link Building | | Giorgio680 -
Top 20 sites for backlinking
My security jobs website was doing very well in Search engines until the penguin got hold of me. I don't profess to be at pro at SEO however seem to have a knack of getting sites to rank well. I think I made some basic mistakes with the original security jobs website, to many links to soon, so I have started again and will build up slowly the backlinks quality rather than quantity this time. My questions is what are the top 20 or so sites that are good to backlink from?
Link Building | | SecJobs0 -
Link Buildinf for new sites
Hello friends, I would like to know what link building strategies you recommend for a newly created websites? Thanks a lot!
Link Building | | pasape0 -
Should you guest post on a site with no quality links?
Suppose a site is related to your industry and has a relatively good domain authority of 49. However when you look at their link profile it is mostly directories and they don't seem to have any natural links from quality sites. Would you still take the link if they offered to publish your guest post?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs1 -
How often is Linkscape and Open Site Explorer updated?
I ran a report on a URL that needed external links updated several weeks ago. I contacted the webmasters at each site with the outdated external link notifying them of the updated URL. I want to check how many have been updated, so I reran the report. Unfortunately, there are some that I know were updated still showing up on the report with the outdated URL. Any suggestions to get a gauge on how many have been updated?
Link Building | | ydop0