Will aggregating external content hurt my domain's SERP performance?

daan.loening

Hi, We operate a website that helps parents find babysitters. As a small add- on we currently run a small blog with the topic of childcare and parenting. We are now thinking of introducing a new category to our blog called "best articles to read today". The idea is that we "re-blog" selected articles from other blogs that we believe are relevant for our audience. We have obtained the permission from a number of bloggers that we may fully feature their articles on our blog. Our main aim in doing so is to become a destination site for parents. This obviously creates issues with regard to duplicated content. The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance? And if so, how can this effect be avoided? It isn't important for us that these "featured" articles rank in SERPs, so we could potentially make them "no index" sites or make the "rel canonical" point to the original author. Any thoughts anyone? Thx! Daan

EGOL

"The question I have is: will including this duplicated content on our domain harm our domains general SERP performance?"

If you have a lot of republished content on the site you could get hit with a panda problem that will reduce the rankings across your domain. I have a very strong site that had lots of professionally written content being republished with permission. On one of the Penguin updates the rankings of that site fell a few places almost across the entire domain. When I "noindex followed" that republished content my rankings came back as normal.

vironc

Hi Daan,

Since you are talking about syndicated content and not duplicate content, there is a big difference and if you follow the best practices for syndicated content, you won't have any problems. The following links will be of help to you in how to go about it:

http://www.wedowebcontent.com/blog/duplicated-vs-syndicated-web-content-after-google-panda.cfm

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively