Duplicate content

[android_lyon]

Hello Seomoz team,

i'm french and so my english is not very good ;-).

I work for a brand site and we publish content about our products.

The problem is : as a brand site, many sites that sell our products, copy our content. And we have duplicate content. And since these sites have worked SEO, they put in place rel canonical tag.

as a brand, how to avoid being accused by Google duplicate content?

tanks for you answer. I hope it's clear.

Take care

Denis

[android_lyon]

I sometimes tell myself that because I am the official website of the brand, I should have Authority for Google. What do you think?

[EGOL]

The canonical tag is a really important subject.

I don't trust it... search engines have not announced EXACTLY how it works that I have seen.

Does the first-indexed copy of content with the canonical tag get search engine exclusivity for that content?  I would like to be really sure about that.

What if I publish new content on a weak site with the canonical tag and then days later a more powerful site sees my content, grabs it, and applies the canonical.   My weak page on a weak site might take several days to be indexed but the strong site can be crawled many times per day.  It it works this way then this tag has huge danger for webmasters with new sites or sites that are not crawled very often....?

.... or maybe I don't understand it?

[DanDeceuster]

If you want to take drastic measures you can tell them to change their content or they cannot continue to sell your products and you will be suing them for copyright infringement. Extreme, yes, but also effective.

A less extreme way is to make sure Google indexes your content first when you put it up. Immediately put a link to it in a tweet and facbeook share. Have a canonical tag declaring your URL to be the original. If you get indexed first, all the duplicates that follow will be the copies and you will be fine.