Will our website traffic be adversely affected by Google by allowiing other sites to post our content on their sites?

[Hope-Media]

Hi,

We're a radio station posting original content each day.

We belong to a sector of similar radio stations. It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group
so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites.

As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

What I would do is ask the other station sites to either:

A. Place a canonical tag to your website in the content they use
B. Place a link to your site on their site as the origin for the content - preferably nofollow if multiple sites use your content

Is it imperative that to be a part of this group that other station websites can take your content? Your content makes your site unique - I would protect that as much as you can and not allow websites to just take it. Not ideal at all for you.

Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck!

[Hope-Media]

Thanks Patrick.

Option B would be a prerequisite for us. Are you aware of any penalties that Google and other search engines might impose?

[Stramark]

Yes! Google would punish you (or do not give you credit for the links) if you would overdo it.

Matt Cutts explained that using pr articles, press releases and blog spinning in order to get more (or to much) links was not allowed and a nofollow should be added to the links.

Also excessive use of linking from widgets can be a reason for penalty. The question is: what is excessive?!

Google is all about unique content. So no excessive content spinning.

[Hope-Media]

Thanks Stramark,

There's a desire to help other radio station websites, so a content pool was suggested.
We'd be participating to help the sector rather than ourselves. But, I don't want to be disadvantaged in the process.

[CommT]

I'm not sure this would help the other radio stations and as others have suggested will damage you. I would fight the proposal as much as possible. It won't benefit either party.

I appreciate though that you may be tasked with making the best of a bad situation. Patrick has come up with some great suggestions.

Good luck whatever you end up doing

[EGOL]

We're a radio station posting original content each day.

Nice work!  You are making a big investment to make this happen.   I hope that you are getting a lot of traffic from search out of this and that people visit your site daily to read your new content.

It's been proposed that we all contribute content to this group so any radio station can grab this content and post it on their own websites.

Those weasels who proposed this want to ride your train.   I bet the ones who propose this run the laziest stations on the planet.   Tell them to get off of their lazy duffs and write their own content.

As the site with the most content and web traffic, could this potentially harm us?

In reality it has a greater chance of tanking your competitors because they could be viewed as the republisher - because your site is probably stronger and may be credited by google as the original publishing source.  BUT, that can not be guaranteed.

If you think that there is little overlap of direct traffic, meaning people who visit your site are unlikely to visit their site, you could consider this....

For a monthly fee, you would allow them to publish a certain number of your articles on their site but the requirement is that they have rel=canonical properly installed on every one of your articles.  That would generate income for you and the article would be attributed to your site, thus protecting you and them from Panda problems and duplicate content filtering.

Or, with rel=canonical installed on every page, you could allow them to use a limited number of articles and you get the ad revenue.  I think that there are some ways to do this that will be to your advantage, but I would not do it without contracts and regular inspections of how things are implemented.

[Hope-Media]

Thanks EGOL for taking the time to give me your thoughts. I've got some things to think about before jumping in.