Canonicle Help

[Luc-W]

Hey everyone,

Hoping someone can shed some light on canonicle links for me. Have read as many articles and tutorials as possible but am still unsure about how to use them in my situation.

I'm about to sign a content syndication agreement with a large newspaper for 3-4 of my articles per week. It's great because this national newspaper has a PR of 8, to my recently reduced PR of 3.

The newspaper are providing attribution links back to my website, both to the homepage and original article on every article. Nice, but worried their size will make their copies of the article list above mine.

Can anyone tell me, IF the newspaper agreed to making canonicle part of attribution, where exactly would it go? On my article? On their article? In their document ? Or in the link that directs back to me?

Thanks.

[seowoody]

Hey,

Newspaper would add canonical tag to their head section of their article with the href pointing to your article on your domain.

If you can, publish your article before they publish theirs as google will know which version it indexed first. Ensure you ping the URL to google too, don't assume google will crawl it instantly.

Safest bet is to wait until your URL is indexed before newspaper publishes theirs.

Ask the newspaper to include the rel author tag in the article to tell google that you're the original owner of that article, see here for more on rel=author - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557

Hope that helps,

Goodluck

Woody

[ThompsonPaul]

The reality is that the newspaper's website is almost certainly going to outrank you for your own articles, Luke. It's not "supposed" to work this way, but in actual fact, that's usually what happens.

If they'll actually give you the rel=canonical for each of your submissions, great, but I'd be very surprised if they'll actually do this.

Another tactic might be to see if they have implemented rel=author, since this is actually designed for the situation you're talking about. You would set up your own Authorship profile on your own Google Plus profile, then add the newspaper as one of the sites to which you contribute. In addition, if the newspaper had rel=author properly implemented on their article pages, you would begin to build author influence from the articles.

Paul

[Luc-W]

You were dead right, Paul. The day my article is syndicated it's instantly wiped off the face of Google and their post is #1.

Will need to investigate the rel=author option with them.

Thanks!!

[ThompsonPaul]

Should have also mentioned - you want to try to get some sort of link back from their page that publishes the article to your own site. Even if it's just something like a link in a bio box at the end of the article.

Second-best situation is to have your site's page with the article ranking just under theirs, but that's pretty tough with Google coming down so hard on duplicate content.

So the only other benefit to being syndicated (unless you can get the rel=author link) is to have a link in the article that could actually drive some new eyeballs to your site.

Good luck & let us know what happens.

Paul

[Luc-W]

Hi Paul,

The newspaper has 3 links back to my website on each syndicated article.

1 link to original article and 2 links to my homepage.

It's safe to assume that links from 5 sites in their network (PR8) will have a good long term effect on my PR?

Cheers,

l.

[ThompsonPaul]

Yea, those inbound links will have helpful long term effects in general.

To keep in mind though:

• large numbers of incoming links from the same website generally start to make each individual link less valuable as ranking signals
• watch out for unnatural anchor link distribution - e.g. don't use a lot of exact-match keyworded anchor text. Be sure to mix in lots of branded/site address anchor text. Otherwise the pattern will look unnatural to search engines and they'll devalue the links even more.
• review your overall site performance after 3 and 6 months to decide whether the additional links and referral traffic are more valuable than just keeping the articles for your own site and working to rank them there.

Paul