Publishing the same article content on Yahoo? Worth It? Penalties? Urgent

[moneywise_test]

Hey All,

I am currently working for a company and they are publishing exactly the same content on their website and yahoo. In addition to this when I put the same article's title it gets outranked by Yahoo. Isn't against Google guidelines? I think Yahoo also gets more than us since they are on the first position. How do you think should the company stop this practice? Please need urgent responses for these questions.

Also look at the attachment and look at the snippets. We have a snippet (description) like the first paragraph but yahoo somehow scans the content and creates meta descriptions based on the search queries. How do they do That?

[TomRayner]

Hey there

I can't see any sense in doing this.

At the very least, it detracts clicks to your site, as it promotes Yahoo over your site. It may also look like to a reader that Moneywise is taking content from Yahoo (rather than the other way round), which cheapens the brand.

The worst case scenario would be that your site is seen as duplicating/stealing content - especially given at how poor Google is at identifying the original source for content.  It could also think that you're duplicating content for the sole purpose of getting links, which again could lead to penalties.

To me, this doesn't make sense.  I'd be much more inclined to keep the content on your own site - get people to come directly to you.  You're getting comments on the articles so you already have a solid user base, clearly.

If your colleagues argue that the Yahoo copies of the content bring in new people to the site, pull up a Google Analytics report and look at how many people entered your site via Yahoo over the last 3 months.  I can almost guarantee you that hardly anyone will be clicking those links in the article - those links by the way look pretty manipulative/commercial in terms of anchor text, which could prompt another penalty.

And in SEO terms, despite the link coming from Yahoo, if no one is linking or sharing that URL on Yahoo, I can tell you now that the link won't have much value to it.

In terms of your snippet question, it just looks like Yahoo are pulling the title and content from the page and generating a fresh meta description from there.  Probably a time saving solution for a website of that size, but certainly not an ideal one.  Your meta descriptions look much better.

Hope this helps.

[moneywise_test]

Thank you for your clear and descriptive response. I really appreciate it. The hardest thing in this case is to persuade the company that the costs outweigh the benefits. It seems that we are getting paid from Yahoo as contributors. I can outline the negative impacts on SEO, definitely will use your points. Need to think something about the returns in terms of potential revenues, also. How do you think?
Or I guess I should just point at that we are losing the overall position as a brand. And content duplication can be one of the main reasons why we are losing many positions.
Right now I will look at the reports.

[TomRayner]

I'd definitely make that point you made in bold.

If you're a paid contributor, it's a matter of does the income outweigh the drawbacks? It's pretty hard to put a tangible figure on that, but there are definite upsides and downsides.  Arguably it adds to Moneywise's branding to be seen on Yahoo, but you can't track that. What you can track are clicks through to the site.

And of course it all depends on what the goal of Yahoo inclusion is.  If it is just a money-spinner and a worthwhile one at that, don't even put the same content on your site.  It's not worth running the risk of duplication penalties and/or link penalties, depending on how Google sees it.

If it is being done to raise brand awareness then (personally) I think it cannibalises your online visibility more than it promotes it - while still presenting SEO problems.

Outside looking in here, but I hope it helps. I'm with you - it's quite a predicament and a delicate situation, so I hope it works out for you.  At the very least, my SEO advice can be seen as impartial and without an agenda, which may be useful to bring to a discussion among people with the company's interests, plus their teams'/

[moneywise_test]

Thank you very much for your advices. Really helped me out here. I will message you sooner or later and tell you how it went, if you are interested. This week I will make a presentation for the team with the reports.

I think this should be addressed ASAP