How to Best Establish Ownership when Content is Duplicated?

[Allie_Williams]

A client (Website A) has allowed one of their franchisees to use some of the content from their site on the franchisee site (Website B). This franchisee lifted the content word for word, so - my question is how to best establish that Website A is the original author?

Since there is a business relationship between the two sites, I'm thinking of requiring Website B to add a rel=canonical tag to each page using the duplicated content and referencing the original URL on site A.

Will that work, or is there a better solution?

This content is primarily informational product content (not blog posts or articles), so I'm thinking rel=author may not be appropriate.

[SEODinosaur]

Im pretty sure you can trackback to the original.. Are you using wordpress?

[grasshopper]

Hi Allie,

You're absolutely on the right track.  Cross-domain canonicalization was created to deal with situations exactly like the one you're describing.  I've used it many times, and it works great.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

[Allie_Williams]

No; site B is using Spry, a now defunct Adobe framework: http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2012/08/update-on-adobe-spry-framework-availability.html

Site A uses ExpressionEngine.

[Allie_Williams]

Thanks grasshopper!