Duplicate content penalty

[DBC01]

Hi there,

I'd like to ensure I avoid a duplicate content penalty and could do with some advice.

There is a popular blogger in my industry.  I have agreed to add his blog to my website.  He currently posts his blog on one of the popular free blogger platforms, and will continue to do this.

The issue is that I will be posting duplicate content onto my site and I want to ensure that I do not trigger a google penalty.

Is there a simple way form me to inform Google of the original source of the content.

My intitial thoughts are:

1. Add a noindex to the Robots.txt file

2. Add a link at the beginning of the article pointing to the original source

3. Adding a rel=canonical tag in the header of each blog entry pointing to the original blog post which resides on a completely different domain.

Thanks

DBC

[Prospector-Plastics]

All good ideas. Another way which we've used that works is to add either of these two tags in your section of each page the reproduce the blogger's articles on your site:

• • this basically says, don't index this page and don't follow any links from this page
• • this tells search engine robots that it's ok to follow the links from this page, but don't index the page

One other option is to have one page on your site that hosts a feed from the blog (using something like FeedBurner) and then apply one of the above tags to just that page. Then you don't ever have to worry about creating new pages each time the blogger posts.

Hope this helps!