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.
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
-
Big retailers and duplicate content
Hello there! I was wondering if you guys have experience with big retailers sites fetching data via API (PDP content etc.) from another domain which is also sharing the same data with other multiple sites. If each retailer has thousands on products, optimizing PDP content (even in batches) is quite of a cumbersome task and rel="canonical" pointing to original domain will dilute the value. How would you approach this type of scenario? Looking forward to read your suggestions/experiences Thanks a lot! Best Sara
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SaraCoppola1 -
Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?
My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics. The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up. I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc. What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple 🙂 Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caro-O
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /1 -
Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda
We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet. We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases. I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar? Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlfredPennyworth0 -
Scraped content ranking above the original source content in Google.
I need insights on how “scraped” content (exact copy-pasted version) rank above the original content in Google. 4 original, in-depth articles published by my client (an online publisher) are republished by another company (which happens to be briefly mentioned in all four of those articles). We reckon the articles were re-published at least a day or two after the original articles were published (exact gap is not known). We find that all four of the “copied” articles rank at the top of Google search results whereas the original content i.e. my client website does not show up in the even in the top 50 or 60 results. We have looked at numerous factors such as Domain authority, Page authority, in-bound links to both the original source as well as the URLs of the copied pages, social metrics etc. All of the metrics, as shown by tools like Moz, are better for the source website than for the re-publisher. We have also compared results in different geographies to see if any geographical bias was affecting results, reason being our client’s website is hosted in the UK and the ‘re-publisher’ is from another country--- but we found the same results. We are also not aware of any manual actions taken against our client website (at least based on messages on Search Console). Any other factors that can explain this serious anomaly--- which seems to be a disincentive for somebody creating highly relevant original content. We recognize that our client has the option to submit a ‘Scraper Content’ form to Google--- but we are less keen to go down that route and more keen to understand why this problem could arise in the first place. Please suggest.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ontarget-media0 -
About duplicate content
We have to products: - loan for a new car
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KBC
- load for a second hand car Except for title tag, meta desc and H1, the content is of course very similmar. Are these pages considered as duplicate content? https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-tweedehands-auto.html
https://new.kbc.be/product/lenen/voertuig/autolening-nieuwe-auto.html thanks for the advice,0 -
Apps content Google indexation ?
I read some months back that Google was indexing the apps content to display it into its SERP. Does anyone got any update on this recently ? I'll be very interesting to know more on it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoomGeek0 -
medical site with no unique content
Hi I'm trying to promote an ecommerce site that sells vitamins and health goods. The site owner doesn't want to add texts in the product pages because it is medical material. therefore he Currently has non unique (duplicated) content in each product page' It is the same exact content all others have (taken From the manufacturer)' Any ideas? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Duplicate Content Question
My understanding of duplicate content is that if two pages are identical, Google selects one for it's results... I have a client that is literally sharing content real-time with a partner...the page content is identical for both sites, and if you update one page, teh otehr is updated automatically. Obviously this is a clear cut case for canonical link tags, but I'm cuious about something: Both sites seem to show up in search results but for different keywords...I would think one domain would simply win out over the other, but Google seems to show both sites in results. Any idea why? Also, could this duplicate content issue be hurting visibility for both sites? In other words, can I expect a boost in rankings with the canonical tags in place? Or will rankings remain the same?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AmyLB0