Republishing content?

[seoman10]

What is the thoughts on republishing content that has already been published on a big new site onto company blog?

My gut feeling is at best Google will ignore at worst a penalty could be round the corner?

All thoughts welcome.

ThanksRichard

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Richard,

Do you mean literally picking the whole thing up and dropping it onto your site or making changes to it before doing so? What is the reasoning behind thinking of doing this?

Generally this is going to be a problem of some sort, be it in the form of a penalty or being seen as plagiarism.

-Andy

[seoman10]

Hello Andy,

I personally don't like the idea, but yes, picking the article and publishing it exactly.

Would it be an alleviate it to credit the original source?

Thanks

Richard

[Chris_Hickman]

Richard,

If you're going to copy the content word for word, or scrape, a news site it's best practice to use a canonical tag on the duplicate content. The content is crawlable and you won't be penalized for duplicate content issues. The tag basically says 'here is the original source', giving credit to the proper source.

Chris

Adficient.com

[Linda-Vassily]

You'd be doing this with the big site's permission, right?

Then yes, as Chris said use a canonical pointing to the original source. That content on your site won't be indexed, but it will be there for visitors to your site to read without leaving your site, which is why I am assuming you'd do this in the first place.

And to make a quick point about the dreaded "duplicate content penalty"--it's not a penalty as such--Google just makes a call on which version to index and which one to drop. In this case, the original would probably indexed with or without the canonical (though you should use it anyway).

That being said, if you have a lot of scraped content, Google may not consider yours to be a quality site and that creates problems.