Content Regurgitators

[wearehappymedia]

Hey,

There are few websites such as http://bestthenews.com/ which regularly copy and paste articles from one of our sites onto theirs - along with all the links back to our site.

The sites don't have a high spam score - but I cant imagine these sites serve any purpose (ie genuine readership) other than trying to boost their traffic.

At the moment we haven't done anything about these, as they are backlinks after all - but could these sites have a negative impact and should we be asking them to remove?

We have even had our content copied and pasted by AGDA (Australian Graphic Design Association) - which is OK as the site has great authority so the links are good, however it's still strange that a large reputable organization would just copy and paste articles without notifying us.

Curious to here other experience / opinions on the matter.

Cheers!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Radi,

Syndicating content isn't always bad if it is done right, and Google is pretty good at getting this right anyway. They know that you can't stop someone copying your content.

Have you checked to see if they are setting your pages as the canonical page? This is the way that syndication should work - ideally they would rel=canonical back to the page where the article resides on your site. If they don't, I would be asking them if they would mind doing that for you. You clearly don't mind good exposure, but I would call it a safeguard for both sites.

-Andy