Will google believe my website has plagiarised if I publish news that is published on a newswire?

[skehoe]

I use newswires to publish press releases or articles for clients. Almost all are published on one site such as PRWeb and picked up by newspapers/publishers. Each of these pieces reference the source as PRWeb (for example).

Each press release is then added to the company website. Do I run the risk of search engines believing this to be plagiarised if not referenced to the 'original source' being PR Web?

Thanks

[irvingw]

yes.

Post the article first on your site and get it indexed before pushing it out to the wire. Link back to the article on the companies site from your press release at the bottom with a "read full story" link. and have the article on your website have a few more paragraphs.

[EGOL]

If the same article exists on lots of websites google will likely do two things......

1. Filter some copies of that article from being displayed in the SERPs (they don't want the searcher clicking into the same stuff six times from the first SERP.  The ones that are filtered are usually the copies on less powerful domains.   It does not matter if they are the original source, or published first.

2. Some sites that have lots of these duplicate content articles posted on them will be hit by Panda problems.  Rankings across the entire domain will be reduced.

[TheeDigital]

Agreed. We just brought on a client who was hit by Panda because they were essentially plagerizing their own content. Meaning they would post the same exact full press release on their site that they would publish elsewhere. And they have 100s of these press releases. What we're doing to help is going through them all and cutting most of the content and including a link to the press release site as "Read full story"

[EGOL]

We had a site that was republishing lots of government and university press releases.  The rankings fell across the domain during one of the Panda updates.  We deleted lots of the old releases that were not popular with our visitors and placed noindex/follow on the rest.  After doing that the site recovered nicely.  The only loss was search traffic into those noindexed releases.

Another site had hundreds of html pages with .pdfs of similar content posted so that we could control the appearance of printed copies.  That site took a Panda hit but recovered after we used .htaccess to noindex/follow the .pdf documents.

[skehoe]

Great- thank you for this advice. I will suggest some of these options to my clients.

[skehoe]

Thanks Irving, thats good advice. A few of the distribution sites take 48 hours to be approved so will have plenty of time to get the website indexed first.