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I kind of know the answer, but just wanted to get some feedback from others.

For the sake of argument, assume there are no other issues with the linking blog, such as: too many ads, thin content, etc.

Question: If you make a payment for a blog post with a dofollow link, and in the blog post there is something to the effect of: "this post has been sponsored by..."

Will Google crawlers detect that and flag that as an unnatural link?

I am wondering if someone can help me understand what's going on with our site.

We had a 50% drop in the number of keywords ranking from February 2018 to October in SEMrush. Looking at SEMrush, I am actually seeing a drop after 2/208 with many competitor's sites as well. We saw moderate improvement in November, but around December 6th, we started seeing a decline the number of keywords ranking again.

In Google Analytics, there was a 10-15% drop in traffic after February 2018, which recovered September to December, but since early December, there is a drop again.

In GWT, I am seeing something similar to analytics with impressions and clicks.

We have done some SEO the past couple of years, but we have taken care to do things white-hat so as not to incur a penalty. We have also invested in writing content for our blog on a regular basis.

Any thoughts?

Hi Guys,

We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content.

The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words.

Here are the questions:

NOTE: the summaries are written by us, and not copied/pasted from other websites.

1. Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief?

2. Could this be beneficial as far as SEO?

3. If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links?

For example:

For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries:

<summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on.

TIA</summary>

We have a blog for our e-commerce site. We are posting about 4-5 blog posts a month, most of them 1500+ words.

Within the content, we have around 10-20 links pointing out to other blog posts or products/categories on our site. Except for the products/categories, the links use non-optimized generic anchor text (i.e guide, sizing tips, planning resource).

Are there any issues or problems as far as SEO with this practice?

Thank You

Hi Guys,

We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content.

The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words.

Here are the questions:

1. Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief?

2. Could this be beneficial as far as SEO?

3. If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links?

For example:

For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries:

<summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on.

TIA</summary>

Hi Guys,

We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content.

The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words.

Here are the questions:

1. Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief?

2. Could this be beneficial as far as SEO?

3. If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links?

For example:

For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries:

<summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on.

TIA</summary>

Hi Guys,

We have a blog for our e-commerce store. We have a full-time in-house writer producing content. As part of our process, we do content briefs, and as part of the brief we analyze competing pieces of content existing on the web. Most of the time, the sources are large publications (i.e HGTV, elledecor, apartmenttherapy, Housebeautiful, NY Times, etc.). The analysis is basically a summary/breakdown of the article, and is sometimes 2-3 paragraphs long for longer pieces of content.

The competing content analysis is used to create an outline of our article, and incorporates most important details/facts from competing pieces, but not all. Most of our articles run 1500-3000 words.

Here are the questions:

NOTE: the summaries are written by us, and not copied/pasted from other websites.

1. Would it be considered duplicate content, or bad SEO practice, if we list sources/links we used at the bottom of our blog post, with the summary from our content brief?

2. Could this be beneficial as far as SEO?

3. If we do this, should be nofollow the links, or use regular dofollow links?

For example:

For your convenience, here are some articles we found helpful, along with brief summaries:

<summary>I want to use as much of the content that we have spent time on.

TIA</summary>