Separating the syndicated content because of Google News

[Lukas_TheCurious]

Dear MozPeople,

I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better:

*A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the  website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news?

**B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will  still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right?

So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important?

This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed.

Thank you!

[MatthewBrown]

Hi Lukas.

The main guideline to follow here is isolating your original content for Google News. This means having the non-syndicated content in its own directory, making sure it's the only content you're submitting in the XML sitemap for News, and when you are accepted into Google News, making sure you keep all the syndicated content out of that news subdirectory.

If you do that, it's fine to have all your other syndicated content in the /SYNDICATED directory. I wouldn't about linking to these articles from other parts of your site. Google won't penalize duplicate content that's syndicated, they just attempt to determine the original creator of the content and filter out the syndication partners from the search results. There's no harm at all having this content on your site or linking to it. As for using NOINDEX or a robots.txt disallow on the syndicated content, it's largely up to you. I know some SEOs who prefer to signal to Google to stay out of there and keep it out of the index, and some SEOs who let the content be crawled and for Google to make the call.

The most important thing is to create a clean, news-only section of the site and only submit that for Google News inclusion, and maintain a sitemap just for that section.

Good luck!

Matthew Brown

Moz