Should I allow a publisher to word-for-word re-publish our article?
-
A small blog owner has asked if they can word-for-word republish one of our blog articles on their own blog. I'm not sure how to respond.
We're don't do any outreach to submit or duplicate our articles throughout the web... so this isn't something being done in mass. And this could be a great signal to Google that somebody else is vouching for the quality of our article, right?
However, I'm a bit concerned about word-for-word duplicating. Normally, if somebody is interested in re-publishing, both the re-publisher and our website would get more value out of it if they re-publisher added some form of commentary or extra value to our post when citing it, right?
This small blog just started releasing a segment in which they've titled "guest blog Thursday". And given the recent concerns with guest blogging (even though I'm not sure this is the classical sense of guest blogging), I'm even more concerned.
Any ideas on how I should respond?
-
I'll just leave this here.
https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913
What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links?
Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google.
And this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
-
Hi David,
I understand your concerns about guest blogging, however, I think you can share your article with other sites, i.e. "syndication," if you just take care of some details. First and foremost, make sure it's a site that's relevant to you or your potential audience. It sounds like it is, so you're probably good to go there. Second, make sure you have a canonical tag in place on your original content. This may or may not matter in terms of how Google attributes the content if the site you post to is a higher authority site than yours, but that's okay because what you're after is the audience and traffic, not the link or link equity. Lastly, to assuage your concerns about any potential penalty from being associated with something that says "guest blog" on it, ask that you get attribution, but that any links back to your site are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. This is something really out of your control, but you can at least attempt to cover that base.
Above all, no matter what, make sure you get full attribution and that you or whomever wrote it is listed as the author.
We have syndicated many of our articles to blogs and online magazines who appeal to our audience. Sometimes the content gets attributed to the blog even if it appeared on our site first if the blog is a high-authority site. Sometimes we even end up getting followed links back simply because the blog editor doesn't know how to do "nofollow." Like you, we don't do it all over the place, but instead are very selective and only offer specific pieces to specific places. If you think about it, a huge amount of news content online is syndicated. Syndication has always been an accepted way of sharing content. As long as it's done for the purposes of providing interesting information to a particular audience instead of for the sake of a link, I think you're perfectly fine doing so.
Hope that helps!
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
-
YOAST SEO: How to set rel=cannonical tags to the original article post
Hi Mozers, Can anyone tell me how to set the rel="canonical tags via SEO YOAST? I have an article posted on my blog that was published first on another blog and i need to reference this entry somehow, I have been told to use rel="canonical - if so I would appreciate some insight on how to do this exactly! Thanks very much in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edward-may0 -
I have a lot of spammy links coming to my 404 page (the URLs have been removed now). Should i re-direct to Home?
I have a lot of spammy links pointing at my website according to MOZ. Thankfully all of them were for some URLs that we've long since removed so they're hitting my 404. Should i change the 404 with a 301 and Re-Direct that Juice to my home page or some other page or will that hurt my ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jagdecat0 -
Is it worth removing date from Blog Posts / Articles
Wondering, is it worth to remove date from articles from seo perspective. Am sure, Google search algorithm would like demote a post written a year back, as against an article on the same post (unless a year old post has very strong Authoritative links) May be it can turn out a bad user experience of removing dates, but if can hide date using Javascripts so as to show it as image to user and hide it from search engines, is it a good idea !!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modi0 -
You're given 10,000 recipes and told to build a site--what would you do?
Say you were given a list of 10,000 recipes and asked to build an SEO friendly site. Would you build a recipe search engine and index the search results (of course making sure that IA and user engagement metrics are great)? Or, would you try to build static pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Best practices for robotx.txt -- allow one page but not the others?
So, we have a page, like domain.com/searchhere, but results are being crawled (and shouldn't be), results look like domain.com/searchhere?query1. If I block /searchhere? will it block users from crawling the single page /searchere (because I still want that page to be indexed). What is the recommended best practice for this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Google Re-Index or multiple 301 Redirects on the server?
Over a year ago we moved a site from Blogspot that was adding dates in the URL's (i.e.. blog/2012/08/10/) Additionally we've removed category folders (/category, /tag, etc). Overall if I add all these redirects (from the multiple date options, etc) I'm concerned it might be an overload on the server? After talking with the server team they had suggested using something like 'BWP Google Sitemaps' on our Wordpress site, which would allow Google some time to re-index our site. What do you suggest we do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seointern0 -
Do links to Blog articles help that much?
So here's my question/scenario.. When it comes to link-building, I'm noticing a trend that goes like this: If you have a website like www.insurancelondonontario.com and you want to rank highly for the target phrase 'insurance london ontario', you need to get links with that anchor-text pointing to the index page, which is the page you want to rank for that keyword. But what I'm noticing, is that a lot of link builders use a strategy where they create a good piece of content.. like "10 Ways to Decrease your Car Insurance Premiums" within the blog, and then build links to that article since it's easier as it's a good piece of content. My question is.. how much can this really help you to rank for 'insurance london ontario' if all your doing is building links to that blog article, and not the main page? I know it helps the overall domain authority, but is it enough to get you ranking for your goal phrase, or is it just a supporting method?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Duplicate Content from Article Directories
I have a small client with a website PR2, 268 links from 21 root domains with mozTrusts 5.5, MozRank 4.5 However whenever I check in google for the amount of link: Google always give the response none. My client has a blog and many articles on the blog. However they have submitted their blog article every time to article directories as well, plain and simle creating duplicate and content. Is this the reason why their link: is coming up as none? Is there something to correct the situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielkamen0