Same article published to 3 different client owned sites

[DonnaDuncan]

My client is publishing their own articles simultaneously on three sites, sites which they own. What can and should they be doing to ensure the get maximum exposure without penalty?

[EricPratum30]

Truth be told, I'm not sure. Google says they reserve the right to not follow a rel=canonical, but that being said, I don't know why they wouldn't in this case. I think the attribution is probably much less important just because it could come in so many different forms (link at the top of the post, link at the bottom, worded one way or another, etc), which becomes different to track and account for on the search engine side.

[DonnaDuncan]

Hi Eric.

Just to be clear, is the attribution a must have or will the canonical tag suffice? If it's necessary, is there specific wording to be used?

Donna

[TommyTan]

Hi Donna,

What your client is doing will cause duplicate content issue.  Hopefully nothing happened to the ranking yet.  I would suggest you use cross-domain canonical tag to tell Google which version of the article you want to show up on the search results.

Instead of sharing the same article on three sites, your client can increase the exposure by sharing it on Social Media platforms or send the article to subscribers on that topic (if it applies).

There are many ways to increase exposure but sharing the same article on multiple site will only cause harm.

[EricPratum30]

I assume all of these sites are thematically related (eg. tractorparts.com, tractorstories.com, and tractorwarehouse.com), right? If not, get them to stop. It's hard to imagine a reason to post many tractor articles on a massage website. If they are related, you might have them give attribution to one of the sites and then cross-domain rel="canonical" it to the place it was first posted. That at the very least will let search engines know that it first came from another site and that it hasn't simply been stolen.

You see things like this all the time. For example, Mitch Joel write for HuffPo, Vancouver Sun, etc and reposts the articles to his blog with a link to the original and a statement about it first appearing on that other site.

[EGOL]

If all three sites have the same article, one or two of the sites could be filtered from the Google SERPs because of duplicate content.  This is much more likely to happen if these sites link to one another.

If there are only a couple of these articles there should not be much of a problem beyond filtering.

However, if they have many articles published this way then they could be hit with a Panda problem.  To avoid that they could use a cross domain canonical to attribute the articles to a single site. To learn about that read these...

http://searchengineland.com/google-supports-cross-domain-canonical-tag-32044

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1716747

You can attribute all of the articles to a single site to give that site maximum value or distribute the attributions to give each site a little value.