Forum Moderators: open
(worried about duplicate penalties issues)
Good to be worried about dupes dropping out. I myself would never allow duplication of content from my own site. Usually, the page with the best linkage or best PageRank wins, and you generally don't have control over whether that's on your site or someone else's.
In some searches that I watch, though, I have seen several different copies of extremely authoritative syndicated articles maintain rankings. All of the pages that rank have a huge number of inbounds. My guess is that there's an inbound linking threshold above which Google will forgive duplication. TrustRank might also enter into it with these particular articles. But don't depend on this happening with you.
If I have a known really good site that's interested in accepting an article from me in exchange for a link, I'll go to the trouble of creating a unique article just for that site.
I push clients with resellers to create content specifically for resellers and to contractually forbid duping clients' site content. If the resellers don't care about dupe penalties among themselves, that's their problem.
Welcome, btw, to WebmasterWorld.
I agree, ideally the syndicated version should be different, which would be in itself a solution. I am just evaluating having only one version for now due to the high number of articles that we aim to produce.
If all the syndicated articles linked back to the original article on our site, search engines would be quicker at identifying duplicate content, however as you said they will likely recognise the version on our site as the original one and not penalise it / put it in the supplementals, due to the number of backlinks to the official article.
Is this a good logic? Or in the absence of a separate version of the article would you publish it only on your site?
