Duplicate Articles

[SirSud]

We submit articles to a magazine which either get posted as text or in a flash container. Management would like to post it to our site as well. I'm sure this has been asked a million times but is this a bad thing to do? Do I need to a rel=canonical tag to the articles? Most of the articles posted to that other site do not contain a link back to our site.

[JasonLancaster]

It's nots a "bad" thing to post the articles in two places, as this type of syndication is somewhat commonplace in the corporate world. Provided your site already as a lot of content and is generally good quality, there's no risk of a penalty for syndicating content.

However, I would encourage management to look at it from the user's perspective: If the user reads the article in the magazine, they're not going to find it very useful to see the same article again on your site. Conversely, if your website visitors aren't going to see the article in the magazine first, why send it to the magazine at all?

One solution is to quote a snippet of the original magazine article on your site, and then write a 200+  word summary or intro for the magazine article that perhaps summarizes the key points, introduces the article in a different way, etc., and then links to the magazine.

From a user's perspective, all the content you've published on your site and in the magazine is unique and potentially useful. From the SEO perspective, there's no possibility of an issue and - unlike syndication - you're adding a unique page of content to your site that is highly likely to be indexed and help you in the long run.

Syndication isn't bad, but you have to ask why you're doing it in the first place. It's often just as easy to create a short "What You'll Learn In This Article" intro on your site than it is to cut-and-paste.

[Dr-Pete]

I'd just add to what Jason said, which I think is generally on-target. If the magazine really is the "source", then posting all those articles again on your site could look "thin" to both users and search engines. In general, you're not ranking for them now, so you probably won't lose out, from an SEO standpoint. There is some risk if you copy a lot of articles, though. You don't want to look like you're scraping your own content, in essence.

The cross-domain rel-canonical should remove the risk of any sort of search penalty or problems. So, again, it's a question of whether it provides value to your site.

At some point, you have to ask - would it make sense to only post them on your site? In other words, if you're building an audience, does it make sense to build it for someone else? Granted, that's a much larger business and marketing decision (far beyond SEO).

[SirSud]

Our site doesn't have the largest audience yet but management simply wants a place they can go or send clients to easily find everything in one place. The magazine is more for offline advertising but they post it online as well.

[Dr-Pete]

If it's really just for your own reference or limited use, I'd probably set up the cross-domain canonical and keep it off of Google's radar. Later, if you wanted to self-publish, you could remove that.

If it's just your site and theirs, it's probably not a high-risk situation. In some ways, it's more about the relationship. If your pages started ranking instead of theirs, I don't know if that goes against your general agreement with them. I'd probably play it safe for now.

[SirSud]

The magazine has already given us the ok, like I said they're much more offline focused so it's more about what Google thinks. I think I agree about playing it safe with the canonical tag though. Thanks!