Product Syndication and duplicate content

[McCaldin]

Hi,

It's a duplicate content question.  We sell products (vacation rental homes) on a number of websites as well as our own. Generally, these affiliate sites have a higher domain authority and much more traffic than our site. The product content (text, images, and often availability and rates) is pulled by our affiliates into their websites daily and is exactly the same as the content on our site, not including their page structure. We receive enquiries by email and any links from their domains to ours are nofollow.

For example, all of the listing text on mysite.com/listing_id is identical to my-first-affiliate-site.com/listing_id and my-second-affiliate-site.com/listing_id.

Does this count as duplicate content and, if so, can anyone suggest a strategy to make the best of the situation?

Thanks

[Linda-Vassily]

You could have your affiliates do a cross-domain canonical, pointing to the original content on your site.

[Houses]

Linda's answers sounds good and yes it does count as duplicate.

Hopefully they will agree to implement the tags as it shows you as the source and not them. Google doesn't always know which site something came from in the first place.

[McCaldin]

Hi,

Ach, having looked the headers for our listings on one of the affiliate sites I can see that they have a canonical tag that points to their own site.  Ok; now i know.

Thank you both for your help

[McCaldin]

Hi again,

At the risk of flogging a dead horse(and I ask merely for infomation); if both my site and the site(s) with the syndicated content have a rel canonical tag pointing to themselves as the authoritative source of the content; how does/can Google know which is the true source?

Is it that all sites with that content are negatively affected because the canonical page cannot be determined?  Or is it possible that more authoritative site is considered to be the original?  Does anyone have any insight/opinion/experience of this?

Thanks

[Houses]

Hi, if you can get yours indexed first it would be seen as the original - otherwise it's difficult to tell.

[Linda-Vassily]

Yes, being indexed first is good, but then again a higher authority site tends to be crawled more frequently so even if you post first, you might not get indexed first.

Going back to your original question, if the higher-ranked sites that also sell your product choose to keep their canonical pointing to their own site, they may well outrank you. It sounds like having your listings on other sites is part of your business model so you can't do anything about that, but maybe you could create some content that is exclusive to your own site and have that rank.

Also, if you have a number of higher-authority sites that use your content and have canonicals pointing to you, that would be a clue to Google that yours is the original content, even if one of the sites keeps the canonical pointing to itself.

[McCaldin]

Hi,

Thank you all for your knowledge.  I now feel better equipped.

Cheers