Should my client copy and paste his blog posts onto other professional sites?

[ScottMcPherson]

I have a client who is an Attorney and participates in a couple of different Q and A legal sites. One of these legal sites is recommending to my client that he copy and paste his blog posts onto his profile page on the Q and A site.

I understand my client wanting to copy and paste his blog posts onto these sites, as it will not only get his content in front of a larger audience, but also lend credibility.

However, I've always heard that that could cause some duplicate content problems. Will my client's blog likely get penalized by google for copying and pasting his blog posts onto other relevant sites?

[Bio-RadAbs]

What if the user gave his original post a rel="canonical" tag?

[simon_realbuzz]

Having your content on another site can be good from a brand awareness point of view and could send you useful referral traffic but you do run the risk of causing duplicate content issues.

If you wish to rank for your own content in SERPs then you run the risk of the Q&A site outranking you for your own content. Much depends on how valuable the exposure on the other site is to you.

You could try an implement a number of strategies to prevent problems including:

• Having the other site provide a link back to your original blog post (to signal you are the originator e.g 'This article first appeared...')
• Having the other site 'noindex' the pages where the blog posts are duplicated (unlikely that they will do it because they probably want to rank for it)
• Have the other site specify a cross-domain canonical to your content URL (again unlikely they will do it)
• Making sure the post is published on your site first before syndicating it to other sites.

The more sites you syndicate to the greater the risk, especially if they have greater authority than your site.