Should I allow a publisher to word-for-word re-publish our article?
-
A small blog owner has asked if they can word-for-word republish one of our blog articles on their own blog. I'm not sure how to respond.
We're don't do any outreach to submit or duplicate our articles throughout the web... so this isn't something being done in mass. And this could be a great signal to Google that somebody else is vouching for the quality of our article, right?
However, I'm a bit concerned about word-for-word duplicating. Normally, if somebody is interested in re-publishing, both the re-publisher and our website would get more value out of it if they re-publisher added some form of commentary or extra value to our post when citing it, right?
This small blog just started releasing a segment in which they've titled "guest blog Thursday". And given the recent concerns with guest blogging (even though I'm not sure this is the classical sense of guest blogging), I'm even more concerned.
Any ideas on how I should respond?
-
I'll just leave this here.
https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913
What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links?
Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google.
And this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html
-
Hi David,
I understand your concerns about guest blogging, however, I think you can share your article with other sites, i.e. "syndication," if you just take care of some details. First and foremost, make sure it's a site that's relevant to you or your potential audience. It sounds like it is, so you're probably good to go there. Second, make sure you have a canonical tag in place on your original content. This may or may not matter in terms of how Google attributes the content if the site you post to is a higher authority site than yours, but that's okay because what you're after is the audience and traffic, not the link or link equity. Lastly, to assuage your concerns about any potential penalty from being associated with something that says "guest blog" on it, ask that you get attribution, but that any links back to your site are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. This is something really out of your control, but you can at least attempt to cover that base.
Above all, no matter what, make sure you get full attribution and that you or whomever wrote it is listed as the author.
We have syndicated many of our articles to blogs and online magazines who appeal to our audience. Sometimes the content gets attributed to the blog even if it appeared on our site first if the blog is a high-authority site. Sometimes we even end up getting followed links back simply because the blog editor doesn't know how to do "nofollow." Like you, we don't do it all over the place, but instead are very selective and only offer specific pieces to specific places. If you think about it, a huge amount of news content online is syndicated. Syndication has always been an accepted way of sharing content. As long as it's done for the purposes of providing interesting information to a particular audience instead of for the sake of a link, I think you're perfectly fine doing so.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Allow Embedding on a YouTube but Only for Specific Sites
Hello, This is more of a technical question but does anyone know if it’s possible to allow embedding on YouTube videos only for specific sites? We want to restrict embedding on our videos but still be able to embed them on our domain. I’m already listed as the primary owner and have the channel linked to my personal email (same email used to upload videos) but when I go to the below link mentioned on Google's Page for Restrict Embedding (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6301625) it says I don’t have permission to access that page for both my personal account and channel. The documentation states it's possible to "Block embedding on all sites or apps except for those URLs or app package names you enter in the text box." but I can't seem to find it. I can only find the option to turn it off/on completely. https://www.youtube.com/content_owner_settings I noticed my personal email hasn't been verified; would that make a difference here? Any help or insight on how to approach this would be very much appreciated. Looking forward to hearing from all of you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R
Thank you in advance.
Best,1 -
List of stop words
Hello, I have that search engine discounts stop words in order to gain computing power. Is there a list of those words that are discounted ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Bolded words in search results
are those synonyms or semantically related keywords ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Robots.txt Allowed
Hello all, We want to block something that has the following at the end: http://www.domain.com/category/product/some+demo+-text-+example--writing+here So I was wondering if doing: /*example--writing+here would work?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ThomasHarvey0 -
Does Google Read URL's if they include a # tag? Re: SEO Value of Clean Url's
An ECWID rep stated in regards to an inquiry about how the ECWID url's are not customizable, that "an important thing is that it doesn't matter what these URLs look like, because search engines don't read anything after that # in URLs. " Example http://www.runningboards4less.com/general-motors#!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 Basically all of this: #!/Classic-Pro-Series-Extruded-2/p/28043025/category=6593891 That is a snippet out of a conversation where ECWID said that dirty urls don't matter beyond a hashtag... Is that true? I haven't found any rule that Google or other search engines (Google is really the most important) don't index, read, or place value on the part of the url after a # tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atlanta-SMO0 -
Better to publish regular new pricelist articles or update the existing ones ?
Hello Moooooooooooooz ! I could not sleep yesterday because of a SEO nightmare ! So I came up with the following question: "Is it better to release regular new articles or update the existing ones" I explain more. Our company release regular pricelists (every month new pricelists available for a month, with the same brands. ex: January pricelist for brand A, etc.) Right now those pricelists are ranking good on google. So I wondered: Would it better to do: Make the pricelist articles stronger: Our company - Brand A pricelist (title) blog/offer/brand-A-pricelist.html (url) -> every month I update the text. So I just have one article /link to work on **Make more content on the pricelist: **Our company - Brand A pricelist - January 2014 (title) blog/offer/brand-A-pricelist-january.html (url) -> So google keeps indexing new fresh content **Work on a extra category: **Our company - Brand A pricelist - January 2014 (title) blog/offer/brand-A/pricelist-january.html (url) -> So I work on one link over the web blog/offer/brand-A where Google finds lots of new relevant contents I know that Matt Cutts said it's good to udpate an old article but in this case it's a bit different. Has anyone experiment the same ? Tks a lot !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AymanH0 -
How do you explain the problem with several re-directs to a client?
I have a client who has done a lot of link building, and just migrated his site from an old platform to a more seo friendly one, but now he is moving pages on the new site. Old Site --> (301 re-direct) --> New Site --> (301 re-direct) --> Changed Page -->(301 re-direct) Changed page again, etc All his changes are making a lot of etra work for me every month and I feel he is wasting a lot of link juice, How Would you explain to the client why they shouldn't be using several re-directs? What can I do to make sure that they keep as much link juice as possible?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0 -
When using ALT tags - are spaces, hyphens or underscores preferred by Google when using multiple words?
when plugging ALT tags into images, does Google prefer spaces, hyphens, or underscores? I know with filenames, hyphens or underscores are preferred and spaces are replaced with %20. Thoughts? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrooklynCruiser3