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Hi Tina,

I work for an agency, so there are some politics involved in rolling out changes to our methodologies. Doing what's best for the client is key, and my research is showing me that there may be some harm in having press releases on your website before or even after having syndicated them. And as Matt Cutts confirmed that links within press release sites carry no value, the potential value of them being picked up by a 3rd party journalist is highly unlikely (unless it truly is newsworthy information) doesn't seem to outweigh the potential risk involved.

However, it does appear there would be two recommended methods one could employ to help ensure you reap the benefits of a press release syndication while dodging the ever-hungry Panda:

1. Add a  tag on the page that has the syndicated content (press release or otherwise).
2. Don't add the press release (or other content) to your site after syndication.

Thanks for the brainstorming session Tina! Hopefully this post helps others looking for guidance on this subject as well.

Tina,

Matt Cutts' example is pretty vague, as usual. He's commenting on a website automating the content to their site. I am thinking more so in terms of, "What if I create a press release, post it on my site, and then distribute it - would that be counted as duplicate content on my own site?"

Perhaps it depends on who indexes it first ... I would love to see any data on this if any one has looked into this theory previously.

I work at National Positions, an SEO company, and have access to hundreds of different GWT accounts. In my 4 years here, I have seen the same issue persist on many different websites. GWT is definitely clunky in certain areas. But the most frustrating thing is the inaccurate 404's and duplicate title issues.

The 301 redirect definitely seems to be working fine. Though the tntperformance.com/home/ link was indexed in Google just a few days ago. I already have a sitemap.xml live (www.tntperformance805.com/sitemap.xml), and submitted it awhile back.

I was more curious if Googlebot indexed the content on the /home/ page, or was just immediately forwarded to the main domain. I cannot think as to how they would have been able to find the page, as there are no internal links or external links pointing at it.

I'll give GWT some time, and hopefully the duplicates go away. Thanks for putting my mind at ease Kane!

I have an issue where I've created a site, (www.tntperformance805.com), using WordPress as a CMS. I enabled the option to use a static page as the home page, and created that page as /home. Well, now the issue that exists is that Google is indexing both www.tntperformance805.com, and www.tntperformance805.com/home/. I've already setup a 301 redirect, pointing /home/ to the main domain, and even have rel=canonical set up automatically, pointing every page to the www version of that particular page.

However, Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting the pages as having duplicate page titles and descriptions. I've even had the page removed from Google's cache and index. I'm assuming Google is not considering the 301 redirect, even though it's setup properly. Should I add rel="canonical" href="http://www.tntperformance805.com" /> to the body of the /home/ post, to ensure that it is giving credit to the main domain?

I am assuming the page is only redirecting to , as that's the www version, but I thought the 301 redirect would enforce that the search engines should give all credit to the main domain.

Thanks in advance for the help everyone. I look forward to some insightful feedback.

Best Regards,

Matt Dimock

I work at National Positions, an SEO company, and have access to hundreds of different GWT accounts. In my 4 years here, I have seen the same issue persist on many different websites. GWT is definitely clunky in certain areas. But the most frustrating thing is the inaccurate 404's and duplicate title issues.