Giveaway outreach - duplicate content?
-
I'm thinking of hosting a giveaway, and promoting this to bloggers. Thinking of how to go about this, I've run into a sort of a road block. I'm thinking the best way would be to attach a flyer detailing the giveaway so that bloggers have easy access to the information. However, I fear that a lot of them will just copy + paste from the flyer straight to a blog post - which will create a lot of duplicate content.
Anybody in the community willing to share their experiences and how they were able to go around the duplicate content issue?
-
Alice,
Most bloggers are not going to put a cross domain rel canonical tag on their page for you. I feel that would severely limit the effectiveness of the campaign by excluding those bloggers.
However, putting the rel canonical tag on your page isn't going to hurt, and could be one more signal that you are the authoritative version of the content. Other signals would be that your page gets indexed first, and that the other pages are linking to you. There is a lot of duplicate content on the web, and Google isn't going to penalize every site with a little bit of content that can be found elsewhere. If they did that every news site from the New York Times to Boise Weekly would be penalized. Duplicate content is a real issue, especially when it comprises the bulk of your content strategy, but I don't think you have much to worry about in this particular case.
The PDF or image version of the flyer is a great idea. I'd go with that and instruct the participants to explain the contest in their own words.
You could even provide a share box below the flyer where they can copy the code to paste the flyer onto their site. You would want the href link to your page to be within that code so the flyer they paste links to your page. If you do this Google will have little doubt as to which page is the original source. Just don't get fancy with the anchor text.
-
Thanks. The pdf is a good idea. But wouldn't you have to ask these blog owners to put a canonical on THEIR page pointing to mine?
-
This is a good question and I think we'd need more info, but I'd first put a canonical tag on your page showing you as the original author and I'd format your flier as a PDF or image, making it slightly more work to copy. Of course, all of these have get-arounds, but they do make it more difficult for someone looking to simply copy the material.
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
-
Content Marketing and Link Building Strategy in Industrial B2B
We struggle link building because engineering sector has few blogs and is much more traditional than many industries. I've just had a new idea on how to do this and wanted to bounce it off people to help refine it and improve it. Search LinkedIn for "content marketing" or similar Refine by Industry etc Ask people on resulting list to guest post on our blog - which is focused on engineers in our sector Then..... For us it boosts our blog content with high quality posts that are interesting for our audience and maybe some traffic benefit. For them it provides SEO benefits and possibly some market exposure. How can I parlay this into getting a link back as well? What else can I do to make it more effective? Cheers Denis
Link Building | | Zippy-Bungle1 -
Can you duplicate on site Blog Posts to Google Plus
I have read from an authorative source that you can duplicate your blog posts on your google plus account without issues as google knows that this is your 'property'. is this correct and what would be the value in doing so? until we have need sign posting new blog posts with a link. Ash
Link Building | | AshShep10 -
Duplicate Content Link Juice
Hello SEO Community, So sometimes I will pitch one guest post to multiple outlets and if multiple reply positively, I will tell all but the single most authoritative site that the article is being published elsewhere and it won't be unique for their site. But some don't mind and still post anyway. I definitely don't mind because it just means that more people will read my article and more sites will be linking back to me. What are the implications on the link juice from the most authoritative site? What about the other ones (which are still authoritative, just not as much)? Is there any reason I should explicitly tell them not to post if I know it will appear somewhere else? Thanks much,
Link Building | | CleanEdisonInc0 -
Challenge: How to SEO a site with almost no content
Wondering what you all would recommend for SEO on this site: www.gudville.com Most of their content is behind a login. Basically there are 5 pages open to Google and to anyone without that login, and they are not open to doing it differently at this time. Once in, there will be a lot of sharing with Facebook friends that will include invitations to join them in their causes. Love to hear all your recommendations. Kathy
Link Building | | katandmouse0 -
Duplicate Content: is it a myth?
Hi everyone, just wanted to clarify some things, i've heard about a million different things on this; I just wanted to ask if duplicate content is a myth or its not thanks. Peter
Link Building | | PeterRota0 -
Link & Content Building
this is a tough one for me. Some of you know that the average SEO contract is fairly limited in budget.Clients in very competitive industries are fearing spending a lot on SEO. I do not think I should list the reasons for this.what do you do with limited budgets for SEO.The onsite-technical optimization is fairly easy and take much prsonal labor but it is manageable.The off-site optimization, links, content , and just getting you client out there is time and funds consuming over the scope of regular projects I know.My question is what do you do with onsite optimization really. I am sure some advice will include write great content, get it out there, guest blogging however those are not readily available and are not fitting the scope of any project.what do you think?
Link Building | | ciznerguy0 -
Create content or more link building?
For those of you who have been doing white hat SEO for many years, I'm curious what % of your time (and/or how many hours/week) you spend on 2 activities: -- creating new, original content for your site -- work on getting links to your existing content I find that working at getting links via article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, etc, is an open ended time suck that never ends. But maybe a necessary investment for sites that have fewer external links than their competitors (?). Adding unique original content to my site is also time consuming, and I'm not sure about the short-term vs long-term benefit of it. I'm curious if you guys who rank in top 3 positions of the SERPs split your time evenly between link building and content building, or if you spend more time on one than the other? And does the answer change for a site that's been around for a while and already has several hundred external links and several hundred pages of original content? Where should I spend my time on a site that is 8 months old, has about 90 pages of original content (all with good on-page SEO), and several hundred external links (with mostly relevant anchor texts)? My goal is to rank higher for the key terms people search on to find a service like mine. Currently I'm on page 1 in SERPs but not in top 3.
Link Building | | scanlin0