Anyone know how to fix duplicate content and titles with news section?

[KateGMaker]

We use django for out site and it's working really well, but we're having an issue with duplicate titles and content via the news section. The news is basically stories sourced from other sites and we link to them via our news section. I'm not sure how to fix the duplicate title issue in this case. I noticed people recommend archiving or using a canonical, but because the news section is set up how it is I don't think that would work. Does anyone have a way around this?A

[LCNetwork]

If you are auto-generating multiple pages with news stories scraped from other sources, you are auto-generating duplicate, or at least "thin" content. I know, because I've been cleaning this up on a few clients' sites.

If you think that your news section adds value to the end user, but are worried about a dupe content issue, add to the head of the news page template, or disallow that folder in robots.txt (I prefer the former, but I'm no expert). This will tell the engines that you don't want them to index these pages. Careful that you only add it to the news pages, though.

Another solution would be to do a brief write up on each story with the link, thereby generating new, quality content for the site that isn't duplicate.

Yet another solution would be to have a single news page that aggregates the links to the stories themselves through an RSS feed, but that doesn't create multiple, thin pages.

If the news pages send you a lot of traffic, you may want to weigh your options. I know that I recently de-indexed a boatload of scraped content and our site's traffic increased sevenfold because of the boost in rankings sitewide, but that's between you and your client. I don't know Django, so I'm sorry I can't help on that front.

Hope that helps?

[KateGMaker]

Thanks. It doesn't drive a ton of traffic so we may just go ahead and make sure the pages don't get crawled.