The etiquette of reproducing someone else's content
-
Hello -
Here is a scenario, representative of something that I just saw play out.
- Site A is a new blog about travel (as an example topic)
- Site B is an older, established blog about travel
- Site C is a new blog launched and owned by Site B that focuses on a particular travel niche (luxury travel, for example)
Here is what happens next
- Site A writes an original piece of content
- Site C then republishes Site A's content, paraphrasing all of the text, but giving Site A credit with a link
- Site B (the established site) publishes a blurb about the article, directing readers with a link to "read more" on Site C. It credits Site A as the original author, but does not link to it.
If you were able to follow that, here is what I would like to know.
Did Site C do anything wrong by republishing a paraphrased version of Site A's content, even though it gave credit with a link?
Did Site B do anything wrong by linking to Site C (which is for all intents and purposes the same website), but not linking to Site A (the original source)?
My sense is that the established blog (Site B) is trying to get it's new publication (Site C) to outrank the original author (Site A) using its own content. In general though, I am curious to get some thoughts on this situation because it raises a few ethical questions that I am not sure about, namely:
Is there anything wrong with publishing "spun" content, if it is done well and links back to the source?
Is there anything wrong with linking to a republished version of an article on a sister website, rather than linking to the original article.
Thanks
-
We have this problem today. We publish a post, it gets picked up by another site that typically outranks because it is a great blog/site and they outrank us for our own story. They always link back to our original post, but very rarely do they use canonical which would be the preferred method.
Theoretically, Google is supposed to know who the original source for the content is and rank accordingly, but I have seen and continue to see the other sites rank higher. However, I do see as time goes by we eventually start to outrank these sites for our posts.
As a bonus though they are backlinks to the blog.
So in the end, if you are borrowing or syndicating someone else's post, always link back to them as the source, this is best practice and as an example of who does this, news agencies. They will syndicate content from the original on their blog and link back to it.
As for the B post linking to the C post, I would think this could backfire as the content on B is duplicate to both C and A but doesn't give the proper credit to A. It may outrank but over time could be penalized for thin or duplicate content.
-
Hi there,
Here are my thoughts, if what you have on site A is the same as site B, my thoughts are that only one of those pages will be ranking in the SERPs. If the two pages are about the exact same thing, with just paraphrasing, it is still duplicate content. The site C linking sounds ok to me, as it isn't duplicate content. Since site B owns it, and they are probably hosted in the same place, it would be better to link C to A if they are hosted separately. You will get better link juice that way.
As far as doing anything wrong, technically, no. It would be best practice to have original content where ever you could.
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
-
How do I properly sitemap a site with static pages + Wordpress in it's own directory?
I apologize for the awkward wording in the headline. No to the issue, I have a site with static pages that are created as follows: url.com, url.com/page1, url.com/page2, etc. I then have WordPress install at url.com/blog. What is the proper method for creating a comprehensive sitemap for my entire domain. I like the sitemap feature provided by Yoast SEO plugin but I assume it will only index the wordpress directory (url.com/blog). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Content Development | | Qcmny0 -
Content Syndication Service
Am curious to get the forum's opinion on content syndication services like SYNND . Has anyone tried them or any other content syndication networks. Does the forum have any recommendations for good quality syndication networks that can be used to distribute content to quality sources.
Content Development | | SEO5Team0 -
Modifying Content to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues
We are planning to leverage specific posts from a US-based blog for our own Canadian blog (with permission, of course) but are aware that this can cause duplicate content issues. We're willing to re-write as much or as little as we must from the initial blog posts to avoid duplicate content issues but I have no idea just how much we will need to re-write. Is there some guideline for this (e.g., 25% of content must be re-written)? I've been unable to find anything. Thank you in advance!
Content Development | | QueenSt0 -
What are the best content writer sites?
Hi, I'm doing some work on a new blog and wondered if anyone could recommend some low cost content writers? I have only justed started researching this service, so any advice the SEOmoz community could give would be grately appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | RBH0 -
Fresh content ideas for a static site?
I have an ecommerce site. My home page is set-up just as I want it. I'm not looking to redo it or change my site to a blog. Just looking for some new, different, SEO friendly ideas or concepts to keep it "fresh".
Content Development | | VictorVC0 -
How to deal with an media press content?
We have a company that create content and send as media press. We would like to use this content in our blog. We made it using RSS and having in our blog the same content. So right now we have some concern about duplicate content. How do you guys deal with deal? Would we be penalized by duplicated content?
Content Development | | kauelinden0 -
How quickly should one add content?
I'm building a content site (the model is AdSense revenue) around a certain niche, and I'm currently paying for about 6 articles to be contributed per week. I have the capacity to be paying for a lot more articles, however, so I'm wondering what, if any, factors exist to recommend building the site up slowly as opposed to throwing on e.g. 100 articles over the next week? Those I can think of are: 1. Going slowly leaves room for better keyword optimization etc. 2. Google seems to favor aged domains/content, so 100 good articles now certainly isn't as advantageous as 100 articles 2 years from now. All that being said, I still feel like the benefit in terms of traffic of adding more content now - since I can - might outweigh these considerations. Does anyone have any thoughts?
Content Development | | ZakGottlieb710 -
Duplicate content for manually setup blog and wordpress blog
We have a website where the ecommerce will not allow us to host blog. So we created our own manual blog page setup. Will this flag duplicate content on Google? http://www.homesupershops.com/blog and http://www.homesupershops.com/blog-july have same content. How come on a word press the same content on http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/ and http://www.vizionseo.com/blog/2011/05/how-can-your-business-rank-high-on-google-maps/ does not flag duplicate content?
Content Development | | VizionSEO990