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
-
Article section on site or blog?
So, I've just started using MOZ since I've decided I wanna be an "expert" in SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KasperGJ
I run a couple of successful websites in Denmark and I've had some SEO guy do some SEO a few years back, but now I wanna learn this myself. I've already read a lot of books, blogs on the subject and talked with several SEO "experts". Anyways, I have a concrete "problem" which I need some help on deciding what to do. Its the same issue / dilemma on all my sites. Dilemma
On my site i have a menu-section called Articles and tips. As the name implies it's basically articles and tips on subjects related to the site.
The articles are both informal for the users and I also use these to attract new users on specific keywords.
The articles are not "spam" articles or quickly made articles, the actually give good information to the users and are wellwritten and so. I've hired a girl to create more articles, so there will be a good flow on articles, interviews and so on soon. Some SEO guys tells me, that I should create and use a external blog "instead" and post the articles there instead of on my site. (ex www.newsiteblog.com) And another SEO guy tells me that I should run a blog on my own site (ex www.ownsite.com/blog) , where I post the articles. I have a really hard time deciding what is the best way, since I hear all kinds of ideas, and really dont know who to trust. My own idea is, that it seems "stupid" to take content from the site and put on external blog.
Then I would also have to create a new blog, and point links from that to my site and so. Any of you guys have any ideas? Sorry for my bad english.0 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Novice Question - Can Browsers realistically distinguish words within concatenated strings e.g. text55fun or should one use text-55-fun? What about foreign languages especially more obscure ones like Finnish which Google Translate often miss-translates?
I am attempting to understand what is realistically possible within Google, Yahoo and Bing as they search websites for KeyWords. Technically my understanding is that they should be able to distinguish common words within concatenated strings, although there can be confusion between word boundaries when ambiguity is involved. So in the simple example of text55fun, do search engines actually distinguish text, 55 and fun separately? There are practical processing, databased and algorithm limitations that might turn a technically possible solution into a unrealistic one at a commercial scale. What about more ambiguous strings like stringsstrummingstrongly would that be parsed as string s strummings trongly or strings strummings trongly or strings strumming strongly? Does one need to use dashes or underscores to make it unambiguous to the search engine? My guess is that the engine would recognize the dash or space and better understand the word boundaries yet ignore the dash or underscore from an overall concatenated string perspective. Thanks in advance to whoever can provide any insight to an old coder who is new to this field.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ny600 -
What are recommended best practices for hosting native advertising sponsored content on domains for large publishers?
On top of clear on-page sponsored content copy would you add meta robots to noindex native advertising? Google recently came out against this type of content in GNews, is there a similar directive for the main index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hankazarian0 -
Is it worth paying to add an article to another website?
I have done some research into the types of sites that my competitors have inbound links from and upon closer inspection it appears that in many cases they would have had to pay for this kind of exposure. I already do a lot of guess blogging (for free) in an attempt to get my content out there, but is it worth paying to add my content (with backlinks) to established sites with good Domain Authority or PageRank? I, as I'm sure do a lot of you, have been inundated throughout my SEO career with offers to pay £X for this and £X for that. What is a good rate to pay? Is it dependent on what you expect to get back or is there an industry norm? Happy for general chatter on this as I want to try it but if I am to get the budget from my manager I need to be certain it will pay dividends and is worthwhile.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Article Falls After Maintaining ranks for years. Page penalty?
Hello, I have had an article consistently rank between 3-5 for the last two plu syears now. Recently it dropped down to 11-13. All I did was add my Google plus picture to it. I have been hearing things along the lines of content rewrites. I am well aware of the fact that there are many duplicates of my article are out there. Is this the legitament problem though? Those articles have links to my sites. I have even found other articles that link to my article that have been duplicated. So there's all sorts of duplicate syndication out there. Wondering if I should start asking people to take down my article. Any info on recent Google activity on this subject?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imageworks-2612901 -
Getting 260,000 pages re-indexed?
Hey there guys, I was recently hired to do SEO for a big forum to move the site to a new domain and to get them back up to their ranks after this move. This all went quite well, except for the fact that we lost about 1/3rd of our traffic. Although I expected some traffic to drop, this is quite a lot and I'm wondering what it is. The big keywords are still pulling the same traffic but I feel that a lot of the small threads on the forums have been de-indexed. Now, with a site with 260,000 threads, do I just take my loss and focus on new keywords? Or is there something I can do to get all these threads re-indexed? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StefanJDorresteijn0 -
Is there a FastTrack to re-index? a site?
Hello... i just started with a new client this week, before working with us his last domain-hosting-webdev provider cancel their account and took off the entire site and left them with a nice "under construction page" (NOT) and added the noindex, nofollow tags. 4 weeks after that, we come into the scene and of course our client it's expecting us to reinsert at least for branded terms the site, and he wants it done on a matter of hours... I tried my best to explain that it's not possible and we are doing everything we can't.... now i ask you guys.. I already created de GWT account, Created a well structured Sitemap and submitted it to google and bing, did the onpage optimizitation at least the basics... there is a way to speed up the process? kind of like "hey you! google bot, forget about the noindex nonsense a come crawl again?" Any help would be great Daniel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daniel.alvarez0