News sites & Duplicate content

[360eight-SEO]

Hi SEOMoz

I would like to know, in your opinion and according to 'industry' best practice, how do you get around duplicate content on a news site if all news sites buy their "news" from a central place in the world?

Let me give you some more insight to what I am talking about. My client has a website that is purely focuses on news. Local news in one of the African Countries to be specific.

Now, what we noticed the past few months is that the site is not ranking to it's full potential. We investigated, checked our keyword research, our site structure, interlinking, site speed, code to html ratio you name it we checked it. What we did pic up when looking at duplicate content is that the site is flagged by Google as duplicated, BUT so is most of the news sites because they all get their content from the same place.

News get sold by big companies in the US (no I'm not from the US so cant say specifically where it is from) and they usually have disclaimers with these content pieces that you can't change the headline and story significantly, so we do have quite a few journalists that rewrites the news stories, they try and keep it as close to the original as possible but they still change it to fit our targeted audience - where my second point comes in. Even though the content has been duplicated, our site is more relevant to what our users are searching for than the bigger news related websites in the world because we do hyper local everything. news, jobs, property etc.

All we need to do is get off this duplicate content issue, in general we rewrite the content completely to be unique if a site has duplication problems, but on a media site, im a little bit lost. Because I haven't had something like this before. Would like to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Chris Captivate

[SEODinosaur]

You must trackback(link back) to the original content. Otherwise Google looks at your content as duplicate. As as you give the original content credit you can avoid duplicate content.

However If you don't want this content to appear in your sites index but you do want it to appear on your site for your users do: noindex, follow -

Or you could use a rel=canonical tag and call out the original post as the canonical post.

[360eight-SEO]

Problem is this way I still give authority to another news source that I am competing against. I will be devaluing my pages.

[SEODinosaur]

Well if you are going to duplicate someones article they deserve the credit. I would recommend combining two or three article sand adding some personal value to it. Create something unique that your audience will like. Also linking to a reputable source shows Google that you are relevant to something. If you run an SEOmoz report card they recommend an external link to a relavent source.

[CleverPhD]

Ditto on what Donnie said.   Purple Cow, if you want that site to be an authority, it needs to be authoritative.  Why would anyone buy the Washington Post if it just copied all its articles from the New York times?   Get a few staff writers to combine and tweak articles as Donnie mentioned or to write original content.

Good luck!