Should I allow a publisher to word-for-word re-publish our article?

[dsbud]

A small blog owner has asked if they can word-for-word republish one of our blog articles on their own blog. I'm not sure how to respond.

We're don't do any outreach to submit or duplicate our articles throughout the web... so this isn't something being done in mass. And this could be a great signal to Google that somebody else is vouching for the quality of our article, right?

However, I'm a bit concerned about word-for-word duplicating. Normally, if somebody is interested in re-publishing, both the re-publisher and our website would get more value out of it if they re-publisher added some form of commentary or extra value to our post when citing it, right?

This small blog just started releasing a segment in which they've titled "guest blog Thursday". And given the recent concerns with guest blogging (even though I'm not sure this is the classical sense of guest blogging), I'm even more concerned.

Any ideas on how I should respond?

[danatanseo]

Hi David,

I understand your concerns about guest blogging, however, I think you can share your article with other sites, i.e. "syndication," if you just take care of some details. First and foremost, make sure it's a site that's relevant to you or your potential audience. It sounds like it is, so you're probably good to go there. Second, make sure you have a canonical tag in place on your original content. This may or may not matter in terms of how Google attributes the content if the site you post to is a higher authority site than yours, but that's okay because what you're after is the audience and traffic, not the link or link equity. Lastly, to assuage your concerns about any potential penalty from being associated with something that says "guest blog" on it, ask that you get attribution, but that any links back to your site are given the rel="nofollow" attribute. This is something really out of your control, but you can at least attempt to cover that base.

Above all, no matter what, make sure you get full attribution and that you or whomever wrote it is listed as the author.

We have syndicated many of our articles to blogs and online magazines who appeal to our audience. Sometimes the content gets attributed to the blog even if it appeared on our site first if the blog is a high-authority site. Sometimes we even end up getting followed links back simply because the blog editor doesn't know how to do "nofollow." Like you, we don't do it all over the place, but instead are very selective and only offer specific pieces to specific places. If you think about it, a huge amount of news content online is syndicated. Syndication has always been an accepted way of sharing content. As long as it's done for the purposes of providing interesting information to a particular audience instead of for the sake of a link, I think you're perfectly fine doing so.

Hope that helps!

[George.Fanucci]

I'll just leave this here.

https://twitter.com/SEOmessiah/status/425417000186150913

What is the value to you? Exposure? Traffic? Links?

Duplicate content has little value in the eyes of Google.

And this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/demystifying-duplicate-content-penalty.html