Same article published to 3 different client owned sites
-
My client is publishing their own articles simultaneously on three sites, sites which they own. What can and should they be doing to ensure the get maximum exposure without penalty?
-
Truth be told, I'm not sure. Google says they reserve the right to not follow a rel=canonical, but that being said, I don't know why they wouldn't in this case. I think the attribution is probably much less important just because it could come in so many different forms (link at the top of the post, link at the bottom, worded one way or another, etc), which becomes different to track and account for on the search engine side.
-
Hi Eric.
Just to be clear, is the attribution a must have or will the canonical tag suffice? If it's necessary, is there specific wording to be used?
Donna
-
Hi Donna,
What your client is doing will cause duplicate content issue. Hopefully nothing happened to the ranking yet. I would suggest you use cross-domain canonical tag to tell Google which version of the article you want to show up on the search results.
Instead of sharing the same article on three sites, your client can increase the exposure by sharing it on Social Media platforms or send the article to subscribers on that topic (if it applies).
There are many ways to increase exposure but sharing the same article on multiple site will only cause harm.
-
I assume all of these sites are thematically related (eg. tractorparts.com, tractorstories.com, and tractorwarehouse.com), right? If not, get them to stop. It's hard to imagine a reason to post many tractor articles on a massage website. If they are related, you might have them give attribution to one of the sites and then cross-domain rel="canonical" it to the place it was first posted. That at the very least will let search engines know that it first came from another site and that it hasn't simply been stolen.
You see things like this all the time. For example, Mitch Joel write for HuffPo, Vancouver Sun, etc and reposts the articles to his blog with a link to the original and a statement about it first appearing on that other site.
-
If all three sites have the same article, one or two of the sites could be filtered from the Google SERPs because of duplicate content. This is much more likely to happen if these sites link to one another.
If there are only a couple of these articles there should not be much of a problem beyond filtering.
However, if they have many articles published this way then they could be hit with a Panda problem. To avoid that they could use a cross domain canonical to attribute the articles to a single site. To learn about that read these...
http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1716747
You can attribute all of the articles to a single site to give that site maximum value or distribute the attributions to give each site a little value.
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
-
Could decreasing publishing frequency negatively affect our SEO?
Hi Moz Community! I run marketing for a DA 43 website. We've been consistently blogging 4-5 times per week for the past 7 years, and its become ingrained in company culture. Due to limited resources, I want to decrease publishing frequency on the blog and focus on other marketing activities (content promotion, higher value content, link outreach, CRO etc). However, our team is worried that decreasing frequency might negatively affect our SEO (organic search is by far our most important acquisition channel, is the main revenue driver for the whole company). When I look at metrics, a couple of things stand out: 1) a very small % of our blog posts get meaningful organic traffic, 2) the majority of organic traffic that produces customers actually goes through the homepage, not the blog, 3) the vast majority of our blog posts are not earning links as we have not focused much on promotion. Anybody have thoughts on specifically whether decreasing blogging frequency might have an impact? (I know Moz and Hubspot have both done frequency experiments, but those were on high-DA, high-engagement sites where every post had a chance to earn links, etc.) so I'm wanting to isolate the case where publishing frequency is decreased on a site where most posts aren't getting links/much engagement. Thanks!
Content Development | | paulz9990 -
Renaming web pages vs new web site
I am struggling with renaming a lot of my web pages because I used short form acronyms vs long form keyword page names and now my pages aren't ranking where they should be and used to be. I am weighing a whole new web site or just a massive update with new page names. I also have an old domain that 301's to the new url but the old one outranks the new one. If you search google for cheap tubes the first domain you see is www.cheaptubesinc.com (the 301'd version) when the real url is www.cheaptubes.com. I know I am getting a duplicate content penalty and when moz crawls my site they see 2X the page that I really have. I tried fixing this with canonical tags but it only helped 5 pages according the moz crawls since doing them. Since last July 4th my business has been declining and I know there was an SEO algorithm update last July 4th. I think either method of renaming the web pages with better SEO for instance cheaptubes.com/single-wall-carbon-nanotubes.htm vs cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm as it is currently. In either case, it is still an HTML 2 website done on frontpage and the question I keep asking myself is if I should just scrap the whole site and start over with a more modern format. Should I try to get a new site together with good SEO and publish it quickly vs rename and 301 a bunch of pages? What about the old site? Do I need to track the old page names and 301 them to the new ones? Any help is appreciates Mike
Content Development | | cheaptubes0 -
Site Content Review Please!
I m looking for someone who can review my site and let me about quality of content on my site. Can anyone suggest / know who I can talk to about this ? Nick
Content Development | | orion680 -
Will a comment section on my site help with seo
I have never been a fan of comment pages such as the sun http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/4783642/bruce-willis-appears-on-the-one-show-in-awkward-interview.html but i was told the other day that not only is it good for the reader but it is also good for seo and increase the number of times that google would visit the page and i would like to know if that is true. if you have added a comment section to your articles i would like to know if you have noticed any change.
Content Development | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Fresh content ideas for a static site?
I have an ecommerce site. My home page is set-up just as I want it. I'm not looking to redo it or change my site to a blog. Just looking for some new, different, SEO friendly ideas or concepts to keep it "fresh".
Content Development | | VictorVC0 -
If I write a article for a client and use Social Book Marking software, will this add value (or does the value depend on how ofen it gets shared)?
I'm about to start experimenting with bookmarking software. My first step is trying Ping.com (because it's free), but I am also keen to try Onlywire.com (which comes at a cost- darn). My questions are: when I create an article for a client and post to all these social sites will this make a difference? Or will it only make a difference if people share the article? Has anyone been experimenting with social bookmarking software that can tell me what results they have had and how they got there? Thanks a mil!
Content Development | | 2Stroke0 -
A site review please
Hi, first post here so hope i have posted this in the right place. From reading the forums a number of people have asked for site reviews and received some very good feedback so I thought I would jump aboard too. One of my companies, Digital Cow, is based around the world of affiliate marketing and had been doing very well until recent Google changes killed the whole process of making sites based around other people's datafeeds. Through considerable testing we have countered this by increasing the blend of duplicate content and unique, niche related, content. As a result a website we launched about 2 months ago is currently getting around 350 unique hits a day but seems to have stagnated. We know the potential is there for thousands of daily hits on this site and well over 20,000 hits a day on all our websites, but we are having issues with Google at the moment. One week we could be position 10 for a keyword, next position 90, then back to position 10 again and so on. In the last week some 95 keywords moved up the ranking and 62 moved down - we are seoing for a couple of hundred keywords. A small sample of some of these words and our ranking for them are listed below bodysuits women 13
Content Development | | Grumpy_Carl
tumbum 14
bright leggings 18
bright tights 18
bridal hold ups 19
opaque hold ups 20
girls in leggings 21
pretty polly hold up 21
fish net hold ups 22
slimming tights 22
tum bum 26
magic knickers 27
toeless tights 28 and there are many more. The website in question is www.brighttights.com. If anyone could spare a moment to offer their opinion on what they think of the site re seo that would be most welcome. Given it's an ecommerce site there are limits to the content we can add on the homepage. Many thanks Carl0 -
Setting up a blog for client, should I build external links to the blog
I have a new client in the holiday industry and want to setup a wordpress blog, we will be writing the first few blogs and linking back to the relevant site page. But I am wondering how I should promote the blog so that the links are more powerful back to his own site. Blogging is not my forte and doesn't come naturally so I really need some good advice to how I can start offering this service to my clients. Thanks
Content Development | | iprosoftware0