The etiquette of reproducing someone else's content

[timsegraves]

Hello -

Here is a scenario, representative of something that I just saw play out.

• Site A is a new blog about travel (as an example topic)
• Site B is an older, established blog about travel
• Site C is a new blog launched and owned by Site B that focuses on a particular travel niche (luxury travel, for example)

Here is what happens next

• Site A writes an original piece of content
• Site C then republishes Site A's content, paraphrasing all of the text, but giving Site A credit with a link
• Site B (the established site) publishes a blurb about the article, directing readers with a link to "read more" on Site C.  It credits Site A as the original author, but does not link to it.

If you were able to follow that, here is what I would like to know.

Did Site C do anything wrong by republishing a paraphrased version of Site A's content, even though it gave credit with a link?

Did Site B do anything wrong by linking to Site C (which is for all intents and purposes the same website), but not linking to Site A (the original source)?

My sense is that the established blog (Site B) is trying to get it's new publication (Site C) to outrank the original author (Site A) using its own content.  In general though, I am curious to get some thoughts on this situation because it raises a few ethical questions that I am not sure about, namely:

Is there anything wrong with publishing "spun" content, if it is done well and links back to the source?

Is there anything wrong with linking to a republished version of an article on a sister website, rather than linking to the original article.

Thanks

[MonicaOConnor]

Hi there,

Here are my thoughts, if what you have on site A is the same as site B, my thoughts are that only one of those pages will be ranking in the SERPs. If the two pages are about the exact same thing, with just paraphrasing, it is still duplicate content. The site C linking sounds ok to me, as it isn't duplicate content. Since site B owns it, and they are probably hosted in the same place, it would be better to link C to A if they are hosted separately. You will get better link juice that way.

As far as doing anything wrong, technically, no. It would be best practice to have original content where ever you could.

[Shawn_Huber]

We have this problem today. We publish a post, it gets picked up by another site that typically outranks because it is a great blog/site and they outrank us for our own story. They always link back to our original post, but very rarely do they use canonical which would be the preferred method.

Theoretically, Google is supposed to know who the original source for the content is and rank accordingly, but I have seen and continue to see the other sites rank higher. However, I do see as time goes by we eventually start to outrank these sites for our posts.

As a bonus though they are backlinks to the blog.

So in the end, if you are borrowing or syndicating someone else's post, always link back to them as the source, this is best practice and as an example of who does this, news agencies. They will syndicate content from the original on their blog and link back to it.

As for the B post linking to the C post, I would think this could backfire as the content on B is duplicate to both C and A but doesn't give the proper credit to A. It may outrank but over time could be penalized for thin or duplicate content.