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
-
Ridding of taxonomies, so that articles enhance related page's value
Hello, I'm developing a website for a law firm, which offers a variety of services. The site will also feature a blog, which would have similarly-named topics. As is customary, these topics were taxonomies. But I want the articles to enhance the value of the service pages themselves and because the taxonomy url /category/divorce has no relationship to the actual service page url /practice-areas/divorce, I'm worried that if anything, a redundantly-titled taxonomy url would dilute the value of the service page it's related to. Sure, I could show some of the related posts on the service page but if I wanted to view more, I'm suddenly bounced over to a taxonomy page which is stealing thunder away from the more important service page. So I did away with these taxonomies all together, and posts are associatable with pages directly with a custom db table. And now if I visit the blog page, instead of a list of category terms, it would technically be a list of the service pages and so if a visitor clicks on a topic they are directed to /practice-areas/divorce/resources (the subpages are created dynamically) and the posts are shown there. I'll have to use custom breadcrumbs to make it all work. Just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on this. Really appreciate any you might have and thanks for reading
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | utopianwp0 -
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
Google Hangout/YouTube Videos- How to re-market?
I've created multiple high quality Google Hangout videos (now stored as YouTube videos) with a client. Does it make sense to download these videos and re-post to third party sources like Vimeo, DailyMotion,etc. or is this considered duplicative content and no additional G value will apply? I know I have some excellent content in these videos and would like to hear from someone with experience on promoting raw video footage, outside of the YouTube format. Have you had success? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mgordon0 -
Publishing Articles + Plagiarism
Everybody at some point will write a feature rich article and publish it on their website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch
What is stopping your competitors from blatantly stealing your article and publishing it on their own website virtually word for word.
If your competitors website gets indexed by Google before yours than surely Google will see your hard work and cost as duplicate content. Question:
Should site owners be worried about this type of practice?
How do we safeguard ourselves from this type of practice? Any other good advice would be appreciated... Thanks Mark1 -
Should I literally delete all the articles I published in 2010/2011?
We became a charity in December and redirected everything from resistattack.com to resistattack.org. Both sites weren't up at the same time, we just switched over. However, GWT still shows the .com as a major backlinker to the .org. Why? More importantly, our site just got hit for the first time by an "unnatural link" penalty according to GWT. Our traffic dropped 70% overnight. This appeared shortly after a friend posted a sidewide link from his site that suddenly sent 10,000 links to us. I figured that was the problem, so I asked him to remove the links (he has) and submitted a reconsideration request. Two weeks later, Google refused, saying.. "We've reviewed your site and we still see links to your site that violate our quality guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes." We haven't done any "SEO link building" for two years now, but we used to publish a lot of articles to ezinearticles and isnare back in 2010/2011. They were picked up and linked from hundreds of spammy sites of course, none of which we had anything to do with. They are still being taken and new backlinks created. I just downloaded GWT latest backlinks and it's a nightmare of crappy article sites. Should I delete everything from EZA/isnare and close my account? Or just wait longer for the 10,000 links to be crawled and removed from my friends site? What do I need to do about the spammy article sites? Disavow tool or just ignore them? Any other tips/tricks?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TellThemEverything0 -
301 Re-direct Implementation & Its Possible Aftermaths
Hi all, I'm currently working on a domain that seems to be 'unofficially' blacklisted by Google. The reason behind my belief are, Ranking process of KW became stagnant. Current crawling and indexing rate has been decreased. Site performance deteriorate after every Search engine update or major data refreshes. And few major indications pointing out that search engines might started doubting its authority. The site is live n running for about 10+ yr and consists of 6000+ pages out of which 5000+ pages are indexed. The site also have some serious issues like, The site has been 2 times penalized by Google. The link ratio & inbound link quality of the site is quite unnatural (mostly directory links, links form spammy sites, bad-neighborhood links etc. ) The site is in flat file and not CMS, thus making it extremely difficult to maintain and update it. Due to the above reasons I was thinking of implementing 301 re-direction. I would like to redirect this poor performing existing domain to a new fresh one keeping the URL structure and files same and maintaining 1:1 redirection rules. I've read an awesome article by Danny Dover on 301 Re direction of a site here in SEOMOZ. It seems that if any one follow the steps mentioned there can actually get benefited by the overall re direction process. Now I'd like know your suggestion about following points: 1. Considering the factors that I've stated, do you think that it would be good to go with this re direction idea? 2. If 301 is implemented then what can be its immediate effects on current rankings and site performance? 3. Assuming that the ranks drowned or gets completely vanished from SERP, after what approx time period can be regain back? 4. Any other suggestion that might help me out to better understand the situation.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ITRIX0 -
Keyword Stuffing if repeating word three times?
If one were to write something like this, "I cannot over-empasisize the importance of branding, branding, branding." on a marketing page that talked about all the types of Internet marketing, would Google consider it keyword stuffing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebWise10 -
How many words in the same page creates keyword stuffing?
In the on page report indicates that the maximum is 15. What are the best? It includes keywords on title, description and images names?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Naghirniac0