Letting Others Use Our Content: Risk-Free Attribution Methods
-
Hello Moz!
A massive site that you've all heard of is looking to syndicate some of our original editorial content. This content is our bread and butter, and is one of the primary reasons why people use our site.
Note that this site is not a competitor of ours - we're in different verticals.
If this massive site were to use the content straight up, I'm fairly confident that they'd begin to outrank us for related terms pretty quickly due to their monstrous domain authority.
This is complex because they'd like to use bits and pieces of the content interspersed with their own content, so they can't just implement a cross-domain canonical. It'd also be difficult to load the content in an iframe with noindex,nofollow header tags since their own content (which they want indexed) will be mixed up with ours.
They're also not open to including a link back to the product pages where the corresponding reviews live on our site.
Are there other courses of action that could be proposed that would protect our valuable content?
Is there any evidence that using schema.org (Review and Organization schemas) pointing back to our review page URLs would provide attribution and prevent them from outranking us for associated terms?
-
Logan, I found your replies very helpful. We have allowed a site to replicate some of our pages / content on their site and have the rel canonical tag in place pointing back to us. However, Google has indexed the pages on the partner's site as well. Is this common or has something gone wrong? the partner temporarily had an original source tag pointing to their page as well as the canonical pointing to us. We caught this issue a few weeks ago and had the original source tag removed. GSC sees the rel canonical tag for our site. But I am concerned our site could be getting hurt for dupe content issues and the partner site may out rank us as their site is much stronger. Any insight would be greatly appreciated
-
"Why did this offer come my way?"
When someone asks to use your content, that is what you should be asking yourself.
When someone asks to use my content, my answer is always a fast. NO! Even if the Pope is asking, the answer will be NO.
-
This is exactly my concern. Our site is massive in it's own industry, but this other site is a top player across many industries - surely we'd be impacted by such an implementation without some steps taken to confirm attribution.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions.
-
Google claims that they are good at identifying the originator of the content. I know for a fact that they are overrating their ability on this.
Publish an article first on a weak site, allow it to be crawled and remain for six months. Then, put that same article on a powerful site. The powerful site will generally outrank the other site for the primary keywords of the article or the weak site will go into the supplemental results. Others have given me articles with the request that I publish them. After I published them they regretted that they were on my site.
Take pieces of an article from a strong site and republish them verbatim on a large number of weak sites. The traffic to the article on the strong site will often drop because the weak sites outrank it for long-tail keywords. I have multiple articles that were ranking well for valuable keywords. Then hundreds of mashup sites grabbed pieces of the article and published them verbatim. My article tanked in the SERPs. A couple years later the mashups fell from the SERPs and my article moved back up to the first page.
-
But, I would not agree with their site being the one to take the damage. YOU will lose a lot of long-tail keyword traffic because now your words are on their site and their site is powerful.
Typically, the first one that's crawled will be considered the originator of the content--then if a site uses that content it will be the one who is damaged (if that's the case). I was under the impression that your content was indexed first--and the other site will be using your content. At least that's the way I understood it.
So, if your content hasn't already been indexed then you may lose in this.
-
This is complex because they'd like to use bits and pieces of the content interspersed with their own content, so they can't just implement a cross-domain canonical. It'd also be difficult to load the content in an iframe with noindex,nofollow header tags since their own content (which they want indexed) will be mixed up with ours.
Be careful. This is walking past the alligator ambush. I agree with Eric about the rel=canonical. But, I would not agree with their site being the one to take the damage. YOU will lose a lot of long-tail keyword traffic because now your words are on their site and their site is powerful.
They're also not open to linking back to our content.
It these guys walked into my office with their proposal they might not make it to the exit alive.
My only offer would be for them to buy me out completely. That deal would require massive severances for my employees and a great price for me.
-
You're in the driver's seat here. _You _have the content _they _want. If you lay down your requirements and they don't want to play, then don't give them permission to use your content. It's really that simple. You're gaining nothing here with their rules, and they gain a lot. You should both be winning in this situation.
-
Thank you for chiming in Eric!
There pages already rank extraordinarily well. #1 for almost every related term that they have products for, across the board.
They're also not open to linking back to our content.
-
In an ideal situation, the canonical tag is preferred. Since you mentioned that it's not the full content, and you can't implement it, then there may be limited options. We haven't seen any evidence that pointing back to your review page URLs would prevent them from outranking you--but it's not likely. If there are links there, then you'd get some link juice passed on.
Most likely, though, if that content is already indexed on your site then it's going to be seen as duplicate content on their site--and would only really hurt their site, in that those pages may not rank.
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
-
No content using Fetch
Wooah, this one makes me feel a bit nervous. The cache version of the site homepage shows all the text, but I understand that is the html code constructed by the browser. So I get that. If I Google some of the content it is there in the index and the cache version is yesterday. If I Fetch and Render in GWT then none of the content is available in the preview - neither Googlebot or visitor view. The whole preview is just the menu, a holding image for a video and a tag line for it. There are no reports of blocked resources apart from a Wistia URL. How can I decipher what is blocking Google if it does not report any problems? The CSS is visible for reference to, for example, <section class="text-within-lines big-text narrow"> class="data"> some content... Ranking is a real issue, in part by a poorly functioning main menu. But i'm really concerned with what is happening with the render.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
ROI on Policing Scraped Content
Over the years, tons of original content from my website (written by me) has been scraped by 200-300 external sites. I've been using Copyscape to identify the offenders. It is EXTREMELY time consuming to identify the site owners, prepare an email with supporting evidence (screen shots), and following up 2, 3, 15 times until they remove the scraped content. Filing DMCA takedowns are a final option for sites hosted in the US, but quite a few of the offenders are in China, India, Nigeria, and other places not subject to DMCA. Sometimes, when a site owner takes down scraped content, it reappears a few months or years later. It's exasperating. My site already performs well in the SERPs - I'm not aware of a third party site's scraped content outperforming my site for any search phrase. Given my circumstances, how much effort do you think I should continue to put into policing scraped content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ahirai1 -
Content Aggregation Site: How much content per aggregated piece is too much?
Let's say I set up a section of my website that aggregated content from major news outlets and bloggers around a certain topic. For each piece of aggregated content, is there a bad, fair, and good range of word count that should be stipulated? I'm asking this because I've been mulling it over—both SEO (duplicate content) issues and copyright issues—to determine what is considered best practice. Any ideas about what is considered best practice in this situation? Also, are there any other issues to consider that I didn't mention?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
Is tabbed content bad for SEO?
I work for a Theater show listings and ticketing website. In our show listings pages (e.g. http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/this-is-our-youth_302998/) we split our content into separate tabs (overview, pricing and show dates, cast, and video). Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by separating the content? Are we better served with keeping it all in a single page? Thanks so much!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Risk Using "Nofollow" tag
I have a lot of categories (like e-commerce sites) and many have page 1 - 50 for each category (view all not possible). Lots of the content on these pages are present across the web on other websites (duplicate stuff). I have added quality unique content to page 1 and added "noindex, follow" to page 2-50 and rel=next prev tags to the pages. Questions: By including the "follow" part, Google will read content and links on pages 2-50 and they may think "we have seen this stuff across the web….low quality content and though we see a noindex tag, we will consider even page 1 thin content, because we are able to read pages 2-50 and see the thin content." So even though I have "noindex, follow" the 'follow' part causes the issue (in that Google feels it is a lot of low quality content) - is this possible and if I had added "nofollow" instead that may solve the issue and page 1 would increase chance of looking more unique? Why don't I add "noindex, nofollow" to page 2 - 50? In this way I ensure Google does not read the content on page 2 - 50 and my site may come across as more unique than if it had the "follow" tag. I do understand that in such case (with nofollow tag on page 2-50) there is no link juice flowing from pages 2 - 50 to the main pages (assuming there are breadcrumbs or other links to the indexed pages), but I consider this minimal value from an SEO perspective. I have heard using "follow" is generally lower risk than "nofollow" - does this mean a website with a lot of "noindex, nofollow" tags may hurt the indexed pages because it comes across as a site Google can't trust since 95% of pages have such "noindex, nofollow" tag? I would like to understand what "risk" factors there may be. thank you very much
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Opinions on Boilerplate Content
Howdy, Ideally, uniqueness for every page's title, description, and content is desired. But when a site is very, very large, it becomes impossible. I don't believe our site can avoid boilerplate content for title tags or meta-descriptions. We will, however, markup the pages with proper microdata so Google can use this information as they please. What I am curious about is boilerplate content repeated throughout the site for the purpose of helping the user, as well as to tell Google what the page is about (rankings). For instance, this page and this page offer the same type of services, but in different areas. Both pages (and millions of others) offer the exact same paragraph on each page. The information is helpful to the user, but it's definitely duplicate content. All they've changed is the city name. I'm curious, what's making this obvious duplicate content issue okay? The additional unique content throughout (in the form of different businesses), the small, yet obvious differences in on-site content (title tags clearly represent different locations), or just the fact that the site is HUGELY authorative and gets away with it? I'm very curious to hear your opinions on this practice, potential ways to avoid it, and whether or not it's a passable practice for large, but new sites. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Noindexing Duplicate (non-unique) Content
When "noindex" is added to a page, does this ensure Google does not count page as part of their analysis of unique vs duplicate content ratio on a website? Example: I have a real estate business and I have noindex on MLS pages. However, is there a chance that even though Google does not index these pages, Google will still see those pages and think "ah, these are duplicate MLS pages, we are going to let those pages drag down value of entire site and lower ranking of even the unique pages". I like to just use "noindex, follow" on those MLS pages, but would it be safer to add pages to robots.txt as well and that should - in theory - increase likelihood Google will not see such MLS pages as duplicate content on my website? On another note: I had these MLS pages indexed and 3-4 weeks ago added "noindex, follow". However, still all indexed and no signs Google is noindexing yet.....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
How do you implement dynamic SEO-friendly URLs using Ajax without using hashbangs?
We're building a new website platform and are using Ajax as the method for allowing users to select from filters. We want to dynamically insert elements into the URL as the filters are selected so that search engines will index multiple combinations of filters. We're struggling to see how this is possible using symfony framework. We've used www.gizmodo.com as an example of how to achieve SEO and user-friendly URLs but this is only an example of achieving this for static content. We would prefer to go down a route that didn't involve hashbangs if possible. Does anyone have any experience using hashbangs and how it affected their site? Any advice on the above would be gratefully received.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sayers1