Duplicating an article I wrote on an external blog
-
Hi, I wrote a blog article on another site. I would like to add the article to my site as well and would like to know the best way to do it.
If I duplicate the article that I wrote would I then risk getting a penalty for duplicate content?
If so, then what is the best way for me to include the article on my site for the benefit of my readers, but not lead to the duplicate content problem?
Would it be better to use a canonical tag? Or to noindex the page?
If I use the canonical tag, am I helping to make the article on the external blog stronger? Where is I use the noindex tag I am not helping my site nor that article I think, is that right?
Last question, if I offer the copy of the article on my site and use the canonical or noindex tag then my site does not receive any direct benefit from the article for SEO. In other words the article wont appear in the search index with a link to my site. What about the comments that people write on the article on my site? That is unique content which may have great questions or points. I want to ensure those can be indexed properly. If I noindex the page I lose out. If I canonicalize (is that a word?) the page then I don't know if will send search results based on those comments to the external blog where that information (the comments from my site) does not exist.
Thank you for any help to better understand this part of seo.
-
I like the rel author option in this case. It doesnt really take care of the indexing issues, but I lean toward not worrying about it. In some cases, i let Google figure out which one they want to index given the two. They will probably choose the original posting, but if you get comments and discussion, I can see that bubbling to the top. Its more like news sites or aggregators at that point.
-
Ah, yes, if you use rel canonical on your blog then the whole page will be nonindexed. I'm wondering if perhaps rel author is what you need here? But I haven't quite figured out enough about that yet!
-
Thank you all for the replies.
@Dunamis, my concern is that if I use the canonical tag for the article then how would a search engine understand the canonical represents the article and not the comments. There can be great discussion within the comments. If the search engine canonalizes the who page and sends users to the target URL then they will send traffic to that site for comments which do not exist on that site. Or if they discount my page all together then the page wont get indexed even though there are some good comments and discussion which otherwise should be indexed.
@Ryan, thank you for reminding me about having a link in the article. That is something I otherwise forgot about but will do in the future.
@Theo, if I had an article on my site which is canonicalized to a URL on another site, and then someone links to the page on my site, do I get credit for the link? I would think the link credit goes through to the canonicalized URL would it not?
-
This sounds like exactly the situation that the canonical tag was created for. Make the tag point to the article that you want indexed.
Or, another option, if you want both to be indexed is to create a second version of the article with different wording.
-
If its just for your users, and its helpful, go ahead and just post the article. Its technically duplicate content, but google has already determined that the article site had the original content up first, and yours may or may not get indexed ever. But you should care.
If you are looking at the SEO implications, thats a whole different reason. I hope you have a link in that article to your site, since you published it. If so, you would actually benefit more from the link value from the other site. If you boost the value of that blog article on the other site, and it has a link to you, that would hold more SEO value down the road then trying to figure out how to get around the dupliate content issue here.
-
"If I duplicate the article that I wrote would I then risk getting a penalty for duplicate content?"
Not likely a penalty, but no benefits either (unless people start linking to the version on your site of course)
"If so, then what is the best way for me to include the article on my site for the benefit of my readers, but not lead to the duplicate content problem?
Would it be better to use a canonical tag? Or to noindex the page?"
Both would work I think, though canonical would be the neater option (assuming it isn't harming you to help the other website).
"If I use the canonical tag, am I helping to make the article on the external blog stronger? Where is I use the noindex tag I am not helping my site nor that article I think, is that right?"
Right and right
"What about the comments that people write on the article on my site?"
I think (this is the toughest one) you're getting the visitors that search for phrases in your comments (Google can't send those visitors to the other site as it doesn't contain the particular phrases) with the cross-domain canonical solution, as with the noindex solution nobody gets these visitors.
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
-
What Are Internal Linking Best Practices For Blogs?
We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words. Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource). Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice? Thank You
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kekepeche0 -
Duplicate Content through 'Gclid'
Hello, We've had the known problem of duplicate content through the gclid parameter caused by Google Adwords. As per Google's recommendation - we added the canonical tag to every page on our site so when the bot came to each page they would go 'Ah-ha, this is the original page'. We also added the paramter to the URL parameters in Google Wemaster Tools. However, now it seems as though a canonical is automatically been given to these newly created gclid pages; below https://www.google.com.au/search?espv=2&q=site%3Awww.mypetwarehouse.com.au+inurl%3Agclid&oq=site%3A&gs_l=serp.3.0.35i39l2j0i67l4j0i10j0i67j0j0i131.58677.61871.0.63823.11.8.3.0.0.0.208.930.0j3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.serp..8.3.419.nUJod6dYZmI Therefore these new pages are now being indexed, causing duplicate content. Does anyone have any idea about what to do in this situation? Thanks, Stephen.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MyPetWarehouse0 -
Duplicate content on yearly product models.
TL;DR - Is creating a page that has 80% of duplicated content from the past year's product model where 20% is about the new model changes going to be detrimental to duplicate content issues. Is there a better way to update minor yearly model changes and not have duplicated content? Full Question - We create landing pages for yearly products. Some years the models change drastically and other years there are only a few minor changes. The years where the product features change significantly is not an issue, it's when there isn't much of a change to the product description & I want to still rank on the new year searches. Since I don't want duplicate content by just adding the last year's model content to a new page and just changing the year (2013 to 2014) because there isn't much change with the model, I thought perhaps we could write a small paragraph describing the changes & then including the last year's description of the product. Since 80% of the content on the page will be duplicated from the last year's model, how detrimental do you think this would be for a duplicate content issue? The reason I'm leaving the old model up is to maintain the authority that page has and to still rank on the old model which is still sold. Does anyone else have any other better idea other than re-writing the same information over again in a different way with the few minor changes to the product added in.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Best practice with duplicate content. Cd
Our website has recently been updated, now it seems that all of our products pages look like this cdnorigin.companyname.com/catagory/product Google is showing these pages within the search. rather then companyname.com/catagory/product Each product page does have a canaonacal tag on that points to the cdnorigin page. Is this best practice? i dont think that cdnorigin.companyname etc looks very goon in the search. is there any reason why my designer would set the canonical tags up this way?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Company Blog at a different URL
Ok, I have been doing a lot of work over the past 6 months, disavowing low quality links from spammy directories to our company website, etc. However, my efforts seem to have had a negative, not positive effect. This has brought me back to reconsidering what we are doing as we have lost a good amount of traction on the nationwide Google rankings specifically. Considering our company blog - platinumcctv(dot)net - we have used this blog for a long time to inform customers of new products, software developments and then to provide them links to purchase those components. Last week, I revamped the nearly default wordpress theme to another on a piece of advice. However, someone told me that all of our links should be nofollow, even though it is a company blog because we have many links coming from this domain, and it could be found as spammy. Potato/Potato - But before I start the tedious task of changing every link to no follow on a whim, i searched a lot, but have found no CLEAR substantiation of this. Any ideas? Other recommendations appreciated as well! Platinum-CCTV(dot)com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PTCCTV0 -
Linkbuilding External Ecommerce
Hi there, I am new in Link Building external, I want some help of you guys! I would like to learn about the best ways to do link building for Ecommerce. Can u help me, please? Thank You!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fabricio_Sahdo0 -
Subdomains - duplicate content - robots.txt
Our corporate site provides MLS data to users, with the end goal of generating leads. Each registered lead is assigned to an agent, essentially in a round robin fashion. However we also give each agent a domain of their choosing that points to our corporate website. The domain can be whatever they want, but upon loading it is immediately directed to a subdomain. For example, www.agentsmith.com would be redirected to agentsmith.corporatedomain.com. Finally, any leads generated from agentsmith.easystreetrealty-indy.com are always assigned to Agent Smith instead of the agent pool (by parsing the current host name). In order to avoid being penalized for duplicate content, any page that is viewed on one of the agent subdomains always has a canonical link pointing to the corporate host name (www.corporatedomain.com). The only content difference between our corporate site and an agent subdomain is the phone number and contact email address where applicable. Two questions: Can/should we use robots.txt or robot meta tags to tell crawlers to ignore these subdomains, but obviously not the corporate domain? If question 1 is yes, would it be better for SEO to do that, or leave it how it is?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Nuanced duplicate content problem.
Hi guys, I am working on a recently rebuilt website, which has some duplicate content issues that are more nuanced than usual. I have a plan of action (which I will describe further), so please let me know if it's a valid plan or if I am missing something. Situation: The client is targeting two types of users: business leads (Type A) and potential employees (Type B), so for each of their 22 locations, they have 2 pages - one speaking to Type A and another to Type B. Type A location page contains a description of the location. In terms of importance, Type A location pages are secondary because to the Type A user, locations are not of primary importance. Type B location page contains the same description of the location plus additional lifestyle description. These pages carry more importance, since they are attempting to attract applicants to work in specific places. So I am planning to rank these pages eventually for a combination of Location Name + Keyword. Plan: New content is not an option at this point, so I am planning to set up canonical tags on both location Types and make Type B, the canonical URL, since it carries more importance and more SEO potential. The main nuance is that while Type A and Type B location pages contain some of the same content (about 75%-80%), they are not exactly the same. That is why I am not 100% sure that I should canonicalize them, but still most of the wording on the page is identical, so... Any professional opinion would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naymark.biz0