An article we wrote was published on the Daily Business Review, we'd like to post it on our site. What is the proper way?

[peteboyd]

Part 1
We wrote an article and submitted it to the Daily Business Review. They published the article on their website.

We want to also post the article on our website for our users but we want to make sure we are doing this properly. We don't want to be penalized for duplicating content. Is this the correct way to handle this scenario written below?

• We added a rel="canonical" to the blog post (on our website). The rel="canonical" is set to the Daily Business Review URL where the article was originally published.
• At the end of the blog post we wrote. "This article was originally posted on The Daily Business Review." and we link to the original post on the Daily Business Review.

Should we be setting the blog post (on our website) to be a "noindex" or rel="canonical" ?

Part 2 Our company was mentioned in a number of articles. We DID NOT write those articles, we were only mentioned. We have also posted those same articles on our website (verbatim from the original article). We want to show our users that we have been mentioned in highly credited articles. All of these articles were posted on our website and are set to be a "noindex". Is that the correct thing to do? Should we be using a rel="canonical" instead and pointing to the original article URL?

Thanks in advance MOZ community for your assistance! We tried to do the leg work of our own research for the answers but couldn't find the exact same scenario that we are encountering**.**

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Pete.  Using rel=canonical would be a better implementation as your site showing up for a search on these articles is perfectly acceptable since they're about your site.  There are also several other design ways in which you can link back to the original published article...

1. Annotation. Instead of republishing the entire article you can quote bits from it and highlight what service/product/thing your company does in relation to the quote.  It could perhaps be an expansion like, "We also make this in custom colors..." a clarification, "This is now a permanent service..." or any other applicable detail really.
2. Screen cap. Some sites churn through articles so an archived screen grab of the article is nice to show the press you got. Photos are especially handy for when you show up in print.
3. A brand scroll. Lots of sites add the logos of well know brands that have written about them titled something like, "What people are saying" and then showing the logo of various sites: the verge, wired, tech crunch, etc. and linking to the article via the logo.

So I'd get rid of the noindex tag.  Me finding your site as a result next to the Daily Business Review site would make my user experience better as the search is returning the correlation even before I click through to read the sources.

[peteboyd]

Hi Ryan,

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond!

I just want to make sure I understand you correctly. Are you suggesting that the blog posts that WERE NOT written by us and only mentioned our firm should be set to a rel="canonical" instead of a "noindex" since we reposted them on our own site? Is setting the copied article to be "noindex" technically the incorrect thing to do? We thought that since we copied the article verbatim and it wasn't our original work that Google shouldn't index this page on our website.

[KeriMorgret]

Setting SEO aside for the moment, in both situations, make sure you have permission to reprint the articles on your site.

[RyanPurkey]

Whether or not you're allowed to copy and paste the article verbatim is something you'll have to determine from the site you copied from, but even noindex wouldn't address the problem of plagiarism if that's what you're worried about as the article would still be on your site.  Basically what you're doing is the reverse of what's in the Google guide on Canonical:

_Content you provide on that blog for syndication to other sites is replicated in part or in full on those domains.    _
http://news.example.com/green-dresses-for-every-day-155672.html (syndicated post)

http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/3245/ (original post)

So in this case the News site (The Daily Business Review) is the source of the article, and you're one of the sites syndicating what they wrote so you point back to them as canonical. Still the questions you bring up are part of the reason why several sites--HuffPo, The Verge, SlashDot, etc--write their own take on a source article instead of reprinting verbatim when linking back.  It's more of the annotation model I mentioned above.