Duplicated content in news portal: should we use noindex?

[forex-websites]

Hello,

We have a news portal, and like other newspapers we have our own content and content from other contributors. Both our content and our contributors content can be found in other websites (we sell our content and they give theirs to us). In this regard, everything seems to work fine from the business and users perspective.

The problem is that this means duplicated content... so my question is: "Should we add the noindex,nofollow" tag to these articles? Notice that there might be hundreds of articles everyday, something like a 1/3 of the website.

I checked one newspaper which uses news from agencies, but they seem not to use any noindex tag. Not sure what others do.

I would appreciate any opinion on that.

[Linda-Vassily]

As a news portal, duplicate content is unavoidable (unless you make up your own news, which actually has been known to do well...)

If you are selling articles, the buyers will tag them for their websites. If they leave them index, follow and put their own canonical on them (common, in my experience) be aware that they can outrank you for your own content if their site has more authority. And having the same content on many sites with conflicting canonicals probably is not going to be worth much SEO-wise for any of them.

As far as articles that are given to you, you should use the canonical of the originating site to give them credit for creating the material. This won't get you search traffic, but readers on your site would have the content right there at their fingertips, and would not have to go to another site to read it. I tend to think that noindex-nofollowing a substantial fraction of your site might raise some red flags.

The assumption here is that the content duplication is being made simply as a convenience to the readers. If you are doing it to increase your rankings, it probably won't work. Excellent, original content should stay on your own site and not be sold.

[JamesNorquay]

My Advice is the following:

1. Check how much traffic is coming from this section, you can do this in landing page analysis on Google Analytic's or the tracking you use.

If you are getting a decent amount of traffic from these articles even if its long tail I would think of another strategy before slapping on a no index. Because when you do the traffic will go.

I have dealt with a similar strategy for a news website in the past, what many of the big syndication players do is take duplication content to rank on Google News for 30-60 days then they 404 the page, I have seen this numerous times, I do not know how viable the strategy is overall.

Ive also noticed some news websites play around with Canonical tags via various partners on duplication content and yes they also do some no indexing.

Really research this before you implement it, I have done a bit of News SEO for Australian sites its an interesting area with limited information online.