I allow authority sites to republish my blog articles, which then outrank me

[kriistjanm]

Hey everyone. This is my first question here, I apologize if it has been covered before.

I have a health and nutrition blog [authority nutrition] that has been up since December 1st, 2012.

I've managed to write quite a few viral articles which have given me a bunch of natural links and a domain authority of 49, which I think is pretty great for such a new site.

Haven't done any link building and everything is 100% white hat. Getting good rankings and good traffic already, so I can't complain.

My only (1st world) problem is that sometimes major authority sites (DA of 70-95) republish my content. I always say yes if they ask me first, but some of them just republish without even asking. My articles are always indexed on my blog before they get republished, but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

These sites always clearly link to the original URL, but they often tend to outrank me for the keywords I was targeting in the articles. They tend to rank in the top 5, but my original article is nowhere to be found.

I plan on continuing to allow these sites to republish as I get powerful links and good traffic from them, but it's a bit frustrating that I don't seem to get the credit as the original source. I've already set up Google Authorship, but it doesn't seem to help.

Is there anything I can do to make sure Google recognizes my article as the original and chooses to rank my site instead of the authority site that simply republished my article?

[WilliamCarr]

Don't give another site permission to republish content that you've already published. In these instances, Google is going to pick one to serve it's users because it's duplicate content.

Instead, establish yourself as a guest blogger on the sites that are interested in your content and create something that's unique for them.

[Humanovation]

Great question.  I, too, thought that setting up Google authorship was supposed to prevent this from happening.  I have the same problem with both legitimate republishing and with scrapers who sometimes get ranked higher even when posting just part of my articles.  Also, my Google plus blurbs and links to my articles get ranked in the #1 spot and my original article will end up on page 10.  Google is whacky ...

[MoosaHemani]

Allowing them to republish your content is fine! If you see Moz’s blogs gets republished on several different sites... and same is the case with Mashable!

I believe what you really should do is to request them to use cross domain canonical and this will be a clear hint to Google that which is the original version of content and Google will rank the original version instead of the duplication one!

Hope this helps!

[jessential]

Have you found many willing to use a cross domain canonical tag?

[MattJanaway]

In reality this isn't a huge issue IF you either get them to provide a snippet of the content (first paragraph) with a link to your article to be able to read more OR you ask them to set your site's content page as canonical. This will show Google that your content is the original version.

The chances of getting another site to set up canonical tags just for you are quite frankly slim. Their sites are probably automated and not manually edited.

Personally I prefer to write something completely unique on the high profile site.