Blogs created by a company for us and another company

[danieldunn10]

Hi, we are not a big company and as well as creating our own blogs, a company for a while now has provided us each month with blog posts. But hey also provide other companies in the UK with the same content.

Each month we create 2 or 3 of our own generated blog posts relating to the services we provide.

Also we receive on average 10 blog posts (pulled in to the site through a word press add in and an rss feed from the company) to the site.

The content is about specific topics which people will be searching for and they are really well optimized pages.

Our own blog posts are looked at more often 80% to 20% but we do have a great link from a national site with a DA of 97 linking to one of their blog posts.

But I wondered if google penalizes us because there will be other companies across the UK with the exact same content as us? Or whether these blog posts will help us because it is great content, even though other companies will probably have the same posts on their site?

Nobody in our area uses this content as we have an agreement with the company which provides it.

Many Thanks

[JordanLowry]

You could very easily run into a duplicate content issue if you are using content that is identical to other websites on your own website. I would highly recommend reading Moz's duplicate content post. You are basically paying to have someone ruin your seo.

I would recommend finding another company that will provide you with unique content so you will not potentially incur any duplicate content issues.

[GlobeRunner]

Jordan is right, most likely you will run into duplicate content issues if you allow duplicate content to be posted on your website. That duplicate content definitely hurts your site's search engine rankings. If you feel the content is good for your site's users, then you may want to keep it, but make sure that it's not being indexed by the search engines.

If you're paying someone to provide you content and that content isn't unique for your website, then I wouldn't see it as very valuable--at least for SEO purposes. I would re-consider whether or not you want that duplicate content on your website, let alone pay a premium for it.

[ChrisAshton]

The others are right, you should be looking for another company to provide you with unique posts for both UX and search engine reasons.

I wouldn't expect that you'll find yourself with a penalty since it will look more like poorly managed syndication than anything else but at the same time, you're not going to get any value out of it.

The best ways to handle it would be to use one of the three methods (preferably rel=canonical) that tell search engines that your content came from one of the other sites it has been posted on but of course, doing this essentially says "this isn't my content, please give me no credit for it" which begs the question... why pay for it?