Copied Content - Define Canonical

[ioannisanif]

Hello,

The Story

I am working on a news organization.

Our website is the https://www.neakriti.gr

My question regards copied content with source references.  Sometimes a small portion of our content is based on some third article that is posted on some site (that is about 1% of our content).  We always put "source" reference if that is the case.  This is inevitable as "news" is something that sometimes has sources on other news sites, especially if there is something you cannot verify or don't have immediate sources, and therefore you need to state that "according to this source, something has happened".

Here is one article of ours that has a source from another site:

https://www.neakriti.gr/article/ellada-nea/1503363/nekros-vrethike-o-agnooumenos-arhimandritis-stin-lakonia/

if you open the above article you will see we have a link to the equivalent article of the original source site

http://lakonikos.gr/epikairothta/item/133664-nekros-entopistike-o-arximandritis-p-andreas-bolovinos-synexis-enimerosi

Now here is my question.

I have read in other MOZ forum articles that a "canonical" approach solves this issue...

How can we be legit when it comes to duplicate content in the eyes of search engines?  Should we use some kind of canonical link to the source site?  Should the "canonical" be inside the link in some way?  Should it be on our  section?  Our site has AMP equivalent pages (if you add the /amp keyword at the end of the article URL).  Our AMP pages have canonical to our original article.  So if we have a "canonical" approach how would the AMP be effected as well?

Also by applying a possible canonical solution to the source URL, does that "canonical" effect our article as not being shown in search results, thus passing all indexing to the canonical site? (I know that canonical indicates what URL is to be indexed).

Additionally, does such a canonical indication make us legit in such a case in the eyes of search engines? (i.e. it eliminates any possible article duplication for original content in the eyes of search engines?).

Or simply put, having a simple link to the original article (as we have it now) is enough for the search engines to understand that we have reference to original article URL?

How would we approach this problem in our site based on its current structure?

[nhhernandez]

Using a canonical depends on how much duplicate content you'll have on the page. If it's a sentence or two, an attribution at the end of the article should be enough. If more than that, you may have to add a canonical tag on the section of the page in order to avoid the duplication issue. If a page has a canonical, Google would likely not index the page and index the original source instead.