My content has been shared across different websites - how do I become the canonical link?
-
I wanted to ask about canonical links. Basically I produced some content for my website which was an interview with a famous band who were playing at a festival that summer. I told the festival and they asked to have exclusive dibs on releasing the piece in exchange for linking back to our domain. I said yes as I knew the link would be a good one. So this interview got posted up, I then posted in on my website's blog, and a month later the local newspaper also featured it on their website. Is there some way to have a creative license over this interview piece (which has been copied word for word) without getting the other websites to edit their code and add a canonical reference? I did ask them but my request was unsuccessful.
I'm thinking there might be no way to claim this content as my website was not the first domain to post it? Any thoughts appreciated.
Thanks
-
Here are a few things that many people do not understand.
-
The date of posting does not indicate who owns the content.
-
The date that Google finds the content does not indicate who posted it first or who owns it.
-
Ownership is independent of date of posting and date of Google discovery.
-
Google does not always grant best rankings to "who they discovered first". The rankings often go to "who is the most powerful".
-
If you file a DMCA against someone who has documented permision to post the content and they decide to sue you for having that content taken down, you are probably going to lose, and you might have to pay more than you expect in damages and more than you expect in attorney fees.
-
The good news is that legal advice on copyright often costs a lot less than you expect and a Hell of a lot less than getting sued. Know what you are doing and the potential consequences before filing DMCA.
-
There are two ways to get the canonical applied. A) the webmaster of the website that is publishing the content must insert a canonical tag into the of the html of the page. It should read like this... B) the webmaster of the website that is publishing the content can apply rel=canonical using .htaccess.
-
-
The date you posted your content will signal to google you are the original.
If the content has been copied contact the webmaster and ask for a reference in the form of a canonical tag.
Otherwise you can report copyright infringement to google
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
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
-
Massive Influx of Total Links - But External Links are Dropping?
Hey Moz Community, I was checking out the Links on one of my client's sites, as they were hit with spammy external links about a year ago, and noticed a large influx of Total Links to the site. According to Moz, external links have actually dropped over the last few months, so I can only assume they are internal links. But, I don't see how my client could add so many internal links over the past 5 months, as they don't do much besides upload new products (they're an ecommerce clothing retailer) via Shopify. They haven't added much over the past half year either. Total links were about 130K in Oct 2019; today, the site has almost 1 million. I've attached some screenshots for reference via Moz to better illustrate the issue. Appreciate any insights into this. Thank you in advance! hhCCUsk lyGltZD
Technical SEO | | EdenPrez0 -
Duplicate Content - Different URLs and Content on each
Seeing a lot of duplicate content instances of seemingly unrelated pages. For instance, http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-bluetooth-speakers.html?from=topnav3 is being tracked as a duplicate of http://www.rushimprint.com/custom-planners-diaries.html?resultsperpg=viewall. Does anyone else see this issue? Is there a solution anyone is aware of?
Technical SEO | | ClaytonKendall0 -
Internal link structure, find out if there are any internal links to this page
When i use this url in open site explorer it says that there are no internal links:
Technical SEO | | wilcoXXL
http://goo.gl/d2s6tJ
Page Authority is also 1, it should be higher of there are any internal links to it right? But i am very sure there are links to this url on my website. For example on this URL:
http://goo.gl/ucixRH How certain can i be of this? Because if i can be very certain, than we have a internal linkstructure problem on our entire site i believe.0 -
Link profile
Hi All, I am doing a link profile audit I have few questions 1. Should i stop worrying about backlinks that i once had and now the websites is down or page is 404 2. The link is nofollow Also i have 60% of my site links few root link and many articles/blogs links pasted in sites without any anchor text, should i worry about them? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Development Website Duplicate Content Issue
Hi, We launched a client's website around 7th January 2013 (http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk), we originally constructed the website on a development domain (http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk) which was active for around 6-8 months (the dev site was unblocked from search engines for the first 3-4 months, but then blocked again) before we migrated dev --> live. In late Jan 2013 changed the robots.txt file to allow search engines to index the website. A week later I accidentally logged into the DEV website and also changed the robots.txt file to allow the search engines to index it. This obviously caused a duplicate content issue as both sites were identical. I realised what I had done a couple of days later and blocked the dev site from the search engines with the robots.txt file. Most of the pages from the dev site had been de-indexed from Google apart from 3, the home page (dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk, and two blog pages). The live site has 184 pages indexed in Google. So I thought the last 3 dev pages would disappear after a few weeks. I checked back late February and the 3 dev site pages were still indexed in Google. I decided to 301 redirect the dev site to the live site to tell Google to rank the live site and to ignore the dev site content. I also checked the robots.txt file on the dev site and this was blocking search engines too. But still the dev site is being found in Google wherever the live site should be found. When I do find the dev site in Google it displays this; Roller Banners Cheap » admin <cite>dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/</cite><a id="srsl_0" class="pplsrsla" tabindex="0" data-ved="0CEQQ5hkwAA" data-url="http://dev.rollerbannerscheap.co.uk/" data-title="Roller Banners Cheap » admin" data-sli="srsl_0" data-ci="srslc_0" data-vli="srslcl_0" data-slg="webres"></a>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.This is really affecting our clients SEO plan and we can't seem to remove the dev site or rank the live site in Google.Please can anyone help?
Technical SEO | | SO_UK0 -
2 similar websites targetting different countries
I have a website that has a .com.au extension running on zencart. If I load up the exact same wesbite (with the same website name) on the .com, will my .com.au be penalised by Google? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | theshining0 -
Am I Doing this Canonical Right?
Hi,I admit to new to the Mod Rewrite.Here is my mod rewrite in my .htaccess# Begin non-www page protection # <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | Force7
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]</ifmodule> # End non-www page protection #If I have my home page set toI really want the canonical to be www.domain.com no trailing slashDid I create a confllict, and if so, how should I change it?0 -
Duplicate content
Greetings! I have inherited a problem that I am not sure how to fix. The website I am working on had a 302 redirect from its original home url (with all the link juice) to a newly designed page (with no real link juice). When the 302 redirect was removed, a duplicate content problem remained, since the new page had already been indexed by google. What is the best way to handle duplicate content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | shedontdiet0