Press Releases and Duplicate Content on Event Related Site

[andywozhere]

I have a site that lists events. I ask those submitting events to submit original content if possible, but frequently they submit press releases which are already published elsewhere. I rewrite some of the press releases, but do not have time to rewrite every press release that comes my way. I want my users to get a comprehensive list of events, but I don't want get a penalty for duplicate content. What is the best solution?

[Devin_Anderson]

Hi Andy,

A non-technical solution would be to have an email template and send it to whoever submits a press release. Something like...

"Dear so and so,

_Thank you very much for your submission to my site. I would be delighted to include your event in my listings. Unfortunately I am very wary of featuring a press release that has been published ad verbatim on other websites. I would really appreciate if you could alter your submission to include _whatever specifications you need .

Once I receive this I will publish your event immediately. "

Alternatively, you could use the rel=canonical tag targeting the original page the press release was published on. This would prevent you being done for duplicate content. However, your page will be less likely to appear for searches conducted for that event. I'd imagine you'd prefer your own pages to appear in the SERPs so this probably isn't ideal. I've never had to deal with this kind of problem myself so I'd be very interested to hear what others have to say.

[andywozhere]

Thanks Devin,

That seems pretty reasonable and in tune with what I was thinking myself. Unfortunately I think if I want to provide users with a complete list of events I will have to probably include some press release material. A couple of further related questions might be:

• Should I be trying to prevent search bots from crawling pages if the content is not original (by using noindex tag and/or use of robots.txt file)?
• I wonder if the syndication-source tag might be more relevant than the canonical tag?

http://support.google.com/news/publisher/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=191283

[gmk1567]

Syndication tag can be used if you are not worried about your pages in Google news.

You may also use "noindex" or "canonical" if you want to play a very safe game. But as you know, your pages won't be indexed.

If you mention the content source at prominent places, you will be O.K.

Example:

In title you may say as "....event by ........."

In the body, you may say as "...thanks to .........."

As long as the overall percentage of duplicate content in your site is in very reasonable level and you link back to content source, you won't find any problem.

Google clarified that content duplication alone will not lead to negative impact.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html