Is pulling automated news feeds on my home page a bad thing?

[amit2076]

I am in charge of a portal that relies on third-party content for its news feeds. the third-party in this case is a renowned news agency in the united kingdom.

After the panda and penguin updates, will these feeds end up hurting my search engine rankings? FYI: these feeds occupy only 20 percent of content on my domain. The rest of the content is original.

[JamesNorquay]

Ideally you want to have unique content on your website.

That is going to work best all of the time.

With News websites it becomes more complex, if you have Wires content or AAP content Google will treat the first indexed version as been the most trust worth version of the copy. Google may treat "syndicated" content in a sense that if it is only on 10 high quality websites it is going to be ok but in the end of the day it is still going to favour original content day in day out, the only benefit of Syndicated content is that it is used by businesses which may not have the time to produce the content.

I hope this helps.

Kind Regards,

James.

[amit2076]

Could you explain a little bit more about what "first indexed version" means?

[JamesNorquay]

The first indexed version means:

1. When you make an original article and Google first crawls this article it is the "First Indexed Version" which means if another site picks up the content after you have it on your site it is duplicative content.

[globalsources.com]

hmm..

In this case, for sites that are crawled more frequently by Googlebot, can I say that they might have an unfair advantage?

In the sense that, if they were to scrap or syndicate other sites content but due to Google crawling and finding the content on their site first (since they are crawled more frequently) Google will label them as the original while the actual content creator will be labelled as duplicate (if Google find the content on their site after...)

[amit2076]

So what do you suggest I do in this scenario, Brent? What's the right thing to do?