Can I post an article on my blog if it has already been published and taken down?

[edward-may]

Hi Guys,

A writer for my site has offered to let me post her article on my blog, however the article has already been published on another blog, but the blog has now been taken down.  If I publish this on my blog will there be any harm to my blog?  I want to stay clean and not be in trouble with penguin in any way shape or form!

Cheers everyone appreciate some advice here!

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Go for it - should be fine. Google will deindex the other location (if it hasn't already) and yours will be the only version up.

[edward-may]

Hi Oleg,

Not sure if the pages have been deindex yet, how long should I wait?

Cheers

Justin

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

You should be fine, but I would research to see if the page has truly been deindexed and the article has been removed. How long you should wait depends on how popular the site was, how often they updated their content, and so on.

Do a quick url search and see if anything pops up.

Another thing I would do - check the backlinks to the original blog post and see if there are any worth updating to your post. If there are, reach out to the webmasters and let them know the blog post has moved to a new URL. This could be a great relationship building tactic for your site as well.

I would be sure to give the writer full credit and maybe even mention that the post was originally posted on ____.com with a nofollow link - that way you are giving credit. But that's upto you!

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[edward-may]

Hi Patrick

Thanks for your response.  I have done a search and found that most of the pages that had these articles up run to a 404 error.  The original author owner of the content has offered them to me as she is part of my site.  But she wanted to give a heads up and say 5 of the articles she gave had already been published and previously taken down as the owner of that blog wanted to renew things...

So before I posted I wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to harm my site and against googles rules.  Thanks for your in depth response Patrick, always great getting feedback from you!

Thanks