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.
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
-
Duplicate content. Competing for rank.
Scenario: An automotive dealer lists cars for sale on their website. The descriptions are very good and in depth at 1,200 words per car. However chunks of the copy are copied from car review websites and weaved into their original copy. Q1: This is flagged in copyscape - how much of an issue is this for Google? Q2: The same stock with the same copy is fed into a popular car listing website - the dealer's website and the classifieds website often rank in the top two positions (sometimes the dealer on top other times the classifieds site). Is this a good or a bad thing? Are you risking being seen as duplicating/scraping content? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1590 -
How to Transfer Content from a Blog to Another
Hello Guys, I have 2 blogs with content. One is getting alot of visitors and the other gets alot less. I´m thinking in transferring all the content from the "weak" blog to the "strong" blog. Both websites are on wordpress. My questions is pretty simple. How can I transfer this content without loosing traffic and how can I avoid duplicate content? Whats the best SEO practices? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kalitenko20140 -
Duplicate Content Question
Currently, we manage a site that generates content from a database based on user search criteria such as location or type of business. ..Although we currently rank well -- we created the website based on providing value to the visitor with options for viewing the content - we are concerned about duplicate content issues and if they would apply. For example, the listing that is pulled up for the user upon one search could have the same content as another search but in a different order. Similar to hotels who offer room booking by room type or by rate. Would this dynamically generated content count as duplicate content? The site has done well, but don't want to risk a any future Google penalties caused by duplicate content. Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompucastWeb1 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, So I have my great content (that contains a link to our site) that I want to distribute to high quality relevant sites in my niche as part of a link building campaign. Can I distribute this to lots of sites? The reason I ask is that those sites will then have duplicate content to all the other sites I distribute the content to won;t they? I this duplication bad for them and\or us? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Studio330 -
Duplicate content from development website
Hi all - I've been trawling for duplicate content and then I stumbled across a development URL, set up by a previous web developer, which nearly mirrors current site (few content and structure changes since then, but otherwise it's all virtually the same). The developer didn't take it down when the site was launched. I'm guessing the best thing to do is tell him to take down the development URL (which is specific to the pizza joint btw, immediately. Is there anything else I should ask him to do? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Any experience regarding what % is considered duplicate?
Some sites (including 1 or two I work with) have a legitimate reason to have duplicate content, such as product descriptions. One way to deal with duplicate content is to add other unique content to the page. It would be helpful to have guidelines regarding what percentage of the content on a page should be unique. For example, if you have a page with 1,000 words of duplicate content, how many words of unique content should you add for the page to be considered OK? I realize that a) Google will never reveal this and b) it probably varies a fair bit based on the particular website. However... Does anyone have any experience in this area? (Example: You added 300 words of unique content to all 250 pages on your site, that each had 100 words of duplicate content before, and that worked to improve your rankings.) Any input would be appreciated! Note: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about "spinning" duplicate content to make it "unique". I am talking about adding unique content to a page that has legitimate duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Duplicate page Content
There has been over 300 pages on our clients site with duplicate page content. Before we embark on a programming solution to this with canonical tags, our developers are requesting the list of originating sites/links/sources for these odd URLs. How can we find a list of the originating URLs? If you we can provide a list of originating sources, that would be helpful. For example, our the following pages are showing (as a sample) as duplicate content: www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=11 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=12 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=15 www.crittenton.com/Video/View.aspx?id=87&VideoID=2 "How did you get all those duplicate urls? I have tried to google the "contact us", "news", "video" pages. I didn't get all those duplicate pages. The page id=87 on the most of the duplicate pages are not supposed to be there. I was wondering how the visitors got to all those duplicate pages. Please advise." Note, the CMS does not create this type of hybrid URLs. We are as curious as you as to where/why/how these are being created. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dlemieux0