Risks with sharing my original content with other sites

[OneMedical]

We write our own unique content to our blog a few times a week. The content is written by professionals (doctors and such) and carries a bit of authority.

We periodically get requests from other websites who want to post our content on their blog. We also find that some people will just go ahead and use our exact content (often with a link attribution), without asking permission.

Is there any risk of us not getting credit for being the original source of the content if others use it in its entirety?Are there other risks?

And more importantly, what should we do to make sure we're getting the SEO credit we deserve?

Some ideas which have been discussed that may or may not have credence:

• Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher
• Only let people cite the introductory paragraph, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text)
• Require people to summarize our story, with a link for the full story

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[soltec]

Additional to the above points, I would suggest adding Canonical tag to the articles. For major articles you can also use Google Webmaster tools to request Google to fetch and index a page, you have a limited number of these requests, so used them wisely.

[Boodreaux]

Sounds like Sage advice!

[loopyal]

This is what we do, to try to make sure we get credit for our own stories, and it seems to be working:

Connect your G+ profile to your articles.

Add your own profile page to your site.

Link the G+ profile to your own profile page.

google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.

It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.

Here is a short video I made for our writers, to explain how to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVX2q_nbGo

[EGOL]

What are your objectives?

If you have "a message to get out" then you should be sharing your content eveywhere with everybody.

If you are trying to make money and develop a reputation for your site then ask yourself these questions....

- what will happen to my income if ten other sites have each of my articles in the Google index?

- who will get the social sharing for all of my hard work?

- why are these people asking to use my content instead of linking to it or tweeting about it?

The only option that you list that I would do is... "Only let people cite the introductory paragraph sentence, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text)"

Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher.

You publish first and then an authoritative site publishes.... they will outrank you.  They will receive your traffic.  They will receive your links, likes, tweets, etc.  Thanks!

[NakulGoyal]

All the 3 options are okay. You have to keep in mind, that with the nature of the Internet, you are not really going to be able to control which one of the 3 technique people/other website owners you, so essentially you can't know what people decide to do.

Another oppurtunity would be to implement something like www.repost.us (I saw that discussed here a couple days ago) and when I took a look at it, it looked interesting. Check it out.

I hope that helps. And yes, the most important aspect would be to make sure the content you are adding should be seen by Google on your website/blog 1st. If you are using WordPress or something like that, I would suggest using a plugin to publish and ping to Google an updated XML sitemap as soon as a new article is added. That should so it for you.