Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Defining Duplicate Content - Online Pr And Web

Posted by melissa on 2/4/2009 at 10:31 AM ET 125 Points
Hello,
I am looking for advice on a duplicate content concern - when publicizing an article through online PR distribution channels, submission to electronic journals, etc. - how do you handle the issue of duplicate content on the publisher's website?

For example, if an article was submitted for online publishing, and that same article was also uploaded to the company's website, would that be considered duplicate content? If so, do you have any suggestions for handling this in such a way that the article could refer back to the website, and vice versa?

Please only respond if you are well-versed in SEO best practices.
Thank you, Melissa
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by SethDotterer on 2/4/2009 at 12:18 PM Member
    Hi Melissa -

    This is a question that gets asked fairly often, but is one of those things that you can out-think yourself on.

    The key to the whole process is using the article to not only generate mind share, but point your users back to your site. Both from a user and SEO perspective.

    The easiest way to do this is to put links to your domain in the article (links to other posts or how-tos) so that:

    a) The engines will see your site as the authoritative source.
    b) You'll get lots of links
    c) You'll get human traffic as well.

    If you're distributing it through traditional 'over the wire' sources, they always send the links through their intermediary domains (even when you buy their SEO packages - shameful). But the engines are pretty good about this.

    Like I said, the best way is to link within the article, put in a bio with a link to your domain, related content etc...

    Does that cover what you're looking for? If not, let me know. :)

    Seth Dotterer
    Director, Search Marketing
    Conductor, Inc.
  • Posted by melissa on 2/4/2009 at 1:46 PM Author
    Hi Seth, my real concern here is that when then article is published through online PR channels (and the exact same article also exists on our website) - is this considered duplicate content, and if so, how do we reduce the negative impact to the website?
  • Posted by SethDotterer on 2/4/2009 at 3:31 PM Accepted
    Hi Melissa,

    So just to further split SEO hairs, there are two issues you're looking at here.

    Duplicate content is most an issue for multiple pages on your site. i.e. if you the same piece of content on all three of these 'pages' of your site:

    acme.com/cheap-widgets/.html
    acme.com/inexpensive-widgets.html
    acme.com/quality-widgets.html

    Than the engine may hit you up with a duplicate content flag.

    The other issue is where the same content appears on different locations, and the engine must determine which one is the canonical URL - the one that it should offer up as the source.

    You can see this issue in the RSS content scrapers, and made for adsense blogs that just steal content. Google's not really happy with those guys (nor is the search engine user). One way to get around this is to put 'This content originally appeared on www.acme.com' in the feed, linking internally to your site, etc...

    Since you're talking about putting up original content and distributing it, assuming the engine knows you're there, you should be fine (or no one would do press releases any more.)

    Hope that helps!

    Seth
  • Posted by excellira on 2/4/2009 at 10:19 PM Accepted
    Canonical URLs are a separate issue.

    Duplicate content refers to on-site as well as off-site content.

    As far as duplicate content issues go you have several choices:

    1. You can place the content on your site, wait until it is cached, and then distribute it to the PR directories. The link(s) back to your site should be directed to the cached page on your site. This will identify the page as the original source.

    From a usability standpoint this is not the preferred choice. If a visitor read your article would they then wish to visit your site and view the same article?

    2. Create and distribute summary PR or articles with links to your site for the full version. The additional content on your page will dilute the dup. content issue.

    3. Rewrite your articles. Send one version to the directories and publish another on your site. This can be expanded to include rewritten versions for the higher quality directories (IE PRWeb, etc).

    Another approach is to be more targeted with the content by determining which directories are actually ranking well for your keywords, or could be, and then submitting unique articles to them.
  • Posted on 2/5/2009 at 11:28 AM Member
    Check copyscape.com !
  • Posted on 2/6/2009 at 7:56 PM Accepted
    I agree with TrinitySEM. When I used to do a lot of article submissions, my workflow was always like this:

    1. Write the article, let's say ~1,000 words
    2. Edit the article, down to ~400-500 words
    3. Submit the edited version, with some kind of "Read more about this topic" message in the author byline.

    With regards to duplicate content issues, linking back to the article on your own site can make a difference but won't necessarily fix the issue.

    If the site syndicating the article is seen as more "authoritative" than yours, you'll probably lose out in the end.

    Writing 2 different versions of your article (1 for your site, and 1 for syndication) would be the best way to go...
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