Retailers Issue

[Paul78]

Hi there,

We have 20 retailers who are about to launch websites and are going to be selling our products on their websites, however with they have no content for these products they are wanting to take our content we have for our product pages on place the content on their websites, is this going to cause an issue for me? We are ranking well for competitive keywords in this niche and do not want to do anything to harm it.

What I would say is the retailers in question of no intention short term anyway of doing anything with SEO.

Thanks for any help

[EGOL]

If they republish your content verbatim then all of these websites will compete against each other (and against you) in the SERPs.  Google will slowly realize that these sites are duplicate and will begin to filter some of them out of the search results.  The ones filtered will generally be the weakest domains (not who published last).

Some people think.... "I'll get 20 retailers to sell my stuff on their websites and I'll get rich."  That can happen if these websites pull traffic from other sources, however, if they pull most of their traffic from search your income might not be significantly higher.

To keep these sites from damaging your rankings you could ask them to include the rel=canonical on their pages to point to your site as the source of the content.  This would work fine for you if you can get them to do it... and eventually one of them will realize what the canonical does and they will not like it.

[anthonydnelson]

At the very least, I would write a new unique set of copy for the product. Let them all share this new copy and compete against each other. Your original copy will be unique and likely keep you high in the rankings. Also, perhaps see if they will link their pages back to your site 'for more information.'

*small edit for clarification