How should we handle syndicated content on a partner site?

[akim26]

Say we have a subdomain with resources (resources.site.com) and a partner site (partner.com) and have an agreement to share content (I know - this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with).

Please comment on the following:

1. the use of cross-domain canonicals on "shared" articles
2. an intro and/or conclusion paragraph that is unique on the site that re-publishes that could say something like "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....."
3. other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping, e.g. author tags
4. any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines.

Thanks a bunch in advance!

• AK26

[EGOL]

...any other steps we can take to ensure neither site gets "dinged" by the search engines...

What you are doing will almost assure that one of the sites will be filtered from the search results.  And if you are going to have lots of links between these  sites I am willing to bet  one month's pay that one of them will be filtered from the SERPs in under six months.

other meta tags to let Google know that we are not scraping

Google doesn't really care if you scraped that content or if it was a gift from the Pope.  They don't like to show duplicate content in their SERPs and will work to filter as much of it as possible.  Adding meta tags will do nothing......

Your primary problem is cross-domain duplicate content... adding "our partner over at resources.site.com recently published the following report ... yada, yada....." sounds like more duplicate content WITHIN the domain.

There are no shortcuts.  If you want to ensure that both sites will perform well you will need to pay the price of unique content.

this isn't ideal but it's what I've got to work with

If you were my employee I would  hope that you would try to educate me.