Original Source Tag or Canonical Tag for News Publishers?

[Starcom_Search]

I have been sourcing content from a news publisher who is my partner for publishing content online. My website deals with sourcing content from a couple of websites. I did use a canonical tag pointing towards the respective syndicated source but I have not seen traffic for those articles.

I did some research and found out that Google does have a tag for news publishers which is the "original-source" tag which helps news publishers to give proper credit for their work. Here's a link to the official word by Google" https://news.googleblog.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html

Although Google has officially stated that the "syndication-source" tag has been replaced by the "canonical" tag. However, there is no mention about the "original-source" tag.
Can I still use the "original-source" tag to syndicate content from my partner site instead of the "canonical" tag?

P.S.: The reason why I am not convinced with the use of the canonical tag is because:
1. As per what Google says, duplicate content won't harm my website unless it is spam. (And since we are rightfully content from our partner'website and showcasing it to a larger audience by hosting it on our website as well, we are thereby not indulging in any unethical practices)

2. The canonical tag could possibly hamper my crawl bandwidth issues as it would essentially need the crawler to crawl the whole page to figure out that the canonical is present, post which any possible valuation that my site could have garnered gets lost.3. Moreover, since I am from the news, media and publication industry, content republication is a widely accepted practice and in such cases simply including a link to the original source of the article or using the original source tag should suffice,

That being mentioned, I do not want to go ahead without taking a second opinion about this. Kindly help me to resolve this issue.

[Carson-Ward]

Hi there,

In any case I would not expect a lot of traffic to posts that are syndicated. Generally people use syndicated content to supplement what's already there. So if the idea is to get more traffic through these posts, I would suggest finding another way.

Having said that, my understanding is that syndication-source still works, but canonical will override it. If you have something that says they no longer recognize it I have never seen it. I've used syndication-source when I don't know the URL or where a CMS/API doesn't allow me to get the URL, as you can point syndication-source back to the root domain URL.

I've also seen sites just post something like "Originally published on http://example.com/page" without incurring any penalties.

To do it by the book, I'd suggest canonical first, syndication-source second, and a source link third. And in this case I'd suggest doing it by the book because syndicated content is generally not going to give you a lot of organic search benefit. Hopefully that helps.