Quality Article written, but on many sites.. Duplicate issue?

[WebNooby]

As part of a re-design of our site including the integration of our previously separate blog, we are using some of our quality articles regarding our industry to get backlinks to our site. Fortunately in our niche industry it is possible to find many out-dated articles, broken links, and just low-quality article content. So my question is.. if we have one article that would potentially allow us to get not just backlinks, but that actual article copied in full onto the other site, are there concerns about duplicate content and the link being useless? --Should I be changing the article a bit every time? --Should I ask them to only copy the first few sentences and link back to us to read more? - Other options? Cheers all

[DanHill]

I'd say you should look at using the canonical tag on all the duplicates so that search engines know for sure which is the original.

[Dr-Pete]

You do risk that those would look like duplicates, and the search engines may filter one or more copies out. If they do that, you may lose any link-juice from them (although that's a lot tougher to measure). The links could also just look low-quality, if you're "spinning" out the same article over and over.

It really depends on the scope. If you did this 3-4 times with a couple of articles, I doubt you'd have any major issues. If you do it 100 times with 1 article, you may get a short-term ranking boost, only to see those links devalued a couple of months later.

If you can get people to post a blurb and the link back to your site, that's definitely ideal. That's the best way to protect the content and signal that you're the source.

You can also have them use the canonical tag, as Daniel mentioned (cross-domain), but my concern is that you'd lose the link-juice. I haven't seen a good study on that. In other words, you'd be seen as the source and would rank for the page, but Google might not count the link back to your site.