Can't canonical, but need pages to show in Google News

[Aggie]

We are a news media site in which much of our content is third-party, and already published by several other sources.  Our current version of our CMS doesn't expose head tags, so I can't canonical to the original and avoid a duplicate content penalty.

Is it ok for news sites NOT to use canonical, or do I have to NOINDEX until our CMS is fixed?

[matbennett]

If you are worried about a duplicate content penalty then you should noindex it.  Considering the possibility of a site wide panda penalty if enough of your content is considered to be low quality this might be a good idea.

[Aggie]

Thanks, Mat.  It begs the question, how do other news sites that AREN'T canonicaling doing fine?  Our site IS doing fine, we have a domain authority of 89.

And the fuzzy comment in GWT Q&A is what has me on the fence, "If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don't follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.."

Does speed matter?  i.e. if we pick up news on the wire, and publish it around the same time as a ton of other news sites, is this less of an issue than publishing a duplicate piece that's been out there and crawled by the engines for a few days?

Would love you additional thoughts.

thanks!

Lisa

[matbennett]

If  you have authority and speed on your side then you have a far greater chance of being seen as the originating source of the article.

[CleverPhD]

Another alternative to canonical would be to simply link to the source in the reprint of the article itself.

You would then be giving that signal to Google on where the content came from without claiming ownership/authorship.

[Aggie]

CleverPHD.  We do link to the originating domain by way of the copyright footer as well as a link back to the original story.

Glad to know we're on the same page.