Does posting a source to the original content avoid duplicate content risk?

[94501]

A site I work with allows registered user to post blog posts (longer articles).

Often, the blog posts have been published earlier on the writer's own blog. Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

"Is posting a link to the original source a sufficient preventative solution to possibly getting dinged for duplicate content?"

No.   To prevent that you need to use the rel=canonical.

See Matt Cutts video here....

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

[94501]

Hi,

Thanks, Egol

So, on a page of ours where someone re-posts their blog post on our site, we'd add a canonical tag on our page to point to their original page? That would be a canonical tag between two different domains. I didn't think that was okay.

And, if we did that, we wouldn't be risking some kind of Panda duplicate content penalty?

Thanks!

[EGOL]

I have used rel=canonical to reduce duplicate content risk.  However, more important, the rel=canonical gives credit to the page where it points.

One problem with guest posting is that to reduce duplicate content risk and transfer credit to your own site, you  must have the site owners cooperation.

Of course, you can get author credit by linking the post to your Google+ profile - if you think that has value.

[94501]

So, you're not saying rel canonical to their page?

What if we just no-follow pages on our site that author originally published on their site? Right now we link to it as orginally published on ....

I'm trying to avoid a Panda penalty for non-unique blog posts reposted on our site.

[irvingw]

Hey Egol, What is the benefit of canonicalling to them over just meta noindex,following the page?

[EGOL]

If you want to avoid panda with content on your own site then you can noindex, follow those pages.

Your visitors will be able to use them but they will not appear in the search engines.

[EGOL]

Canonicalling them will give the benefit to the author's original page.   It does not have benefit for you.

If you want them to rel=canonical for you then it is good to do it for them.

[94501]

Egol,

The Matt Cutts video seems to say you can't canonicalize between two totally different domains. So, we couldn't use a canonical for that.

[EGOL]

The last question in the text is......

Can rel="canonical" be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?

There are situations where it's not easily possible to set up redirects. This could be the case when you need to migrate to a new domain name using a web server that cannot create server-side redirects. In this case, you can use the rel="canonical" link element to specify the exact URL of the domain preferred for indexing. While the rel="canonical" link element is seen as a hint and not an absolute directive, we do try to follow it where possible.

[irvingw]

I'm concerned about what's best for my site  -and would therefore not post other peoples content - so i've never had to deal with this

I guess if I owned both sites i would prefer to cross canonical the duped pages to my other site   If i didn't own the other site i would probably just opt to noindex follow that page i guess

[EGOL]

I publish other people's content.  That caused a Panda problem about a year ago - which I was able to recover from by noindexing those pages.  Now I noindex / follow any content that I publish that appears on another website.

The articles that I write are published on my own site only.

[loopyal]

Hi EGOL.

If you noindex pages and other sites link to them, do you benefit from that or not?

Do you see any pagerank on those, that are old enough to show it?

What does Roger say about those?

[EGOL]

I don't know what Roger says, but I believe that followed links on noindex pages will pass PageRank, anchor text and other link benefits. Your instructions are to "no index" but the page will still be crawled.