How to publish duplicate content legitimately without Panda problems

[EGOL]

Let's imagine that you own a successful website that publishes a lot of syndicated news articles and syndicated columnists.

Your visitors love these articles and columns but the search engines see them as duplicate content.

You worry about being viewed as a "content farm" because of this duplicate content and getting the Panda penalty.

So, you decide to continue publishing the content and use...

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

This allows you do display the content for your visitors but it should stop the search engines from indexing any pages with this code.  It should also allow robots to spider the pages and pass link value through them.

I have two questions.....

1. If you use "noindex" will that be enough to prevent your site from being considered as a content farm?

2. Is there a better way to continue publication of syndicated content but protect the site from duplicate content problems?

[Nick_Ker]

I am assuming you intend to use no index only on the duplicate content articles.  Using no index on everything would also prevent your content from being indexed and found through Google.

If you are using Wordpress or something else that will allow showing excerpts, you could try making the article pages noindex and show only excerpts on the main page and category pages which would be indexed and followed.  I think that would make the articles not appear in searches and avoid duplicate content penalties, while allowing the pages that show the excerpts to still be indexed and rank OK.

The idea here is that the pages showing the excerpts would have enough text to help the home and category pages to rank for the subject matter and hopefully not be seen as what it is - copied content.

You will probably eventually get caught by the Panda, but this may work as a temporary solution until you can get some original content mixed in.

[EGOL]

Thank you, Nick.

We will be using the "noindex" only on the pages with syndicated content.  This is a DreamWeaver site and it is easy to place the code on specific pages and does not use excerpts.

Do you still see a potential problem?

The question really is... "Could a site that contains a lot of syndicated content have a Panda problem if the pages that contain that content are noindexed?"

[Nick_Ker]

Noindexing the syndicated articles should, in theory, minimize the likelihood of having a Panda problem, but it seems like Panda is constantly evolving. You will probably see some kind of drop in rankings as the number of indexed pages of for site will decrease. If you have say, 1000 pages total on the site and suddenly 900 are taken out of the index, this might be a problem. If it is a much smaller percentage of the site, you might not have a problem at all.  Other than the number of indexed pages, I don't think you will have a problem once the syndicated stuff is noindexed.
It will probably take Google a while to re-index/un-index the pages, so hopefully it won't be a fast drop if there is one. In the long run, it is probably better to at least have the appearance of trying to do the right thing. Linking to the source, and maybe using rel=canonical tags to the original article would also be a good practice.

[EGOL]

Good idea about attributing with rel=canonical.

Thanks!