Giveaway outreach - duplicate content?

[ALLee]

I'm thinking of hosting a giveaway, and promoting this to bloggers. Thinking of how to go about this, I've run into a sort of a road block. I'm thinking the best way would be to attach a flyer detailing the giveaway so that bloggers have easy access to the information. However, I fear that a lot of them will just copy + paste from the flyer straight to a blog post - which will create a lot of duplicate content.

Anybody in the community willing to share their experiences and how they were able to go around the duplicate content issue?

[DougHoltOnline]

This is a good question and I think we'd need more info, but I'd first put a canonical tag on your page showing you as the original author and I'd format your flier as a PDF or image, making it slightly more work to copy. Of course, all of these have get-arounds, but they do make it more difficult for someone looking to simply copy the material.

[ALLee]

Thanks. The pdf is a good idea. But wouldn't you have to ask these blog owners to put a canonical on THEIR page pointing to mine?

[Everett]

Alice,

Most bloggers are not going to put a cross domain rel canonical tag on their page for you. I feel that would severely limit the effectiveness of the campaign by excluding those bloggers.

However, putting the rel canonical tag on your page isn't going to hurt, and could be one more signal that you are the authoritative version of the content. Other signals would be that your page gets indexed first, and that the other pages are linking to you. There is a lot of duplicate content on the web, and Google isn't going to penalize every site with a little bit of content that can be found elsewhere. If they did that every news site from the New York Times to Boise Weekly would be penalized. Duplicate content is a real issue, especially when it comprises the bulk of your content strategy, but I don't think you have much to worry about in this particular case.

The PDF or image version of the flyer is a great idea. I'd go with that and instruct the participants to explain the contest in their own words.

You could even provide a share box below the flyer where they can copy the code to paste the flyer onto their site. You would want the href link to your page to be within that code so the flyer they paste links to your page. If you do this Google will have little doubt as to which page is the original source. Just don't get fancy with the anchor text.