How important is the date published in Google ranking?

[alika]

I am involved with a big site (online 1995, PR 7 site).

One type of content they have is given to print news publications for "exclusive" publishing, which basically means that the content will first appear in the print and website of the newspaper website. The content creator will publish the content in their own website 24 hours after the newspaper publishes it. This is an agreement with various print media, not just one newspaper.

The problem is this: when searching for the exact title of the content, the content creator's page cannot be found. But the print publication's website -- and all those who have scrapped the content -- show up. So basically everyone EXCEPT the content creator shows up for searches of the content.

Is the fact that the content creator publishes the content 24 hours after the newspaper published it causing this problem? I get it that Google cannot determine where the content really originated from in this case. But given the "authority" of this content creator in its space, I thought that that could trump this problem and still show up.

Can someone help explain this problem? And how the original content creator make their site appear when searches for their content comes up?

Thanks

[alika]

The content creator's page apparently shows up -- about a week or two after being made live in their site

[jimbeetle]

Just by their nature newspaper sites are pretty much considered authorities in their own right and Google crawls them very regularly. So of course Google is going to credit the "authority" where it first sees the article as the originator.

The two-week window in your second post is probably a result of the article dropping down the hierarchy of the newspaper site and staying somewhat higher on the site with which you're working.

Not really sure if there's anything that can be done about this. If the page titles and descriptions are close to the same as the newspaper sites you might consider fiddling these a bit to get around the initial dupe content filter.

Hopefully other folks will have better ideas.

[zehrila]

Pr 7 1995, that site has already an authority, i don't think it would tint it much, knowing that internet is chunk of duplicate content, i think its hall be alright. It would be better if online newspaper link back to that site. However, there could be a potential issue if the copyscappers or content aggregators scarp that news several times before that pr7 site actually publishes it.

[alika]

Yes, when the newspaper publishes the piece online, content aggregators and copyscappers already publish it.

A piece that went live this morning on the original source's site went out to the newspaper yesterday. I checked today and the first 3 pages are those who have all republished the piece, with the original source nowhere to be found.

I thought that with the authority of the original content source that they could combat through the clutter.

These are op-ed pieces, and newspapers don't have the habit of linking to the source's website. I was just alarmed to see consistently very low traffic to this type of content.

[web_india]

The content creator will publish the content in their own website 24 hours after

Is there any possibility to re-work the agreement with print news publications to get it modified to 24 hours "before" rather than "after"?

Otherwise , it seems your own content is hurting yourself while the news and online website of print publications are benefitting from your content.

[alika]

That would be ideal web_india. But doesn't suit their business goals.

They'd rather have their content published in WSJ or NYT, rather than be the first one to publish on the web. Afterall, this type of content was specifically created for these print publications. They have a whole department whose main task is to pitch content to both national and local print publications.

But I like the tweaking the title a bit when publishing. Afterall, the titles are usually more intended for the print audience -- catchy but without any keywords. This way, they can make their titles more seo-friendly and at the same time get out of the duplicate content filter

[jimbeetle]

Don't forget the description, that's a very important indicator for the initial dupe filter.

You might also want to look into the possibility of stronger internal linking. If the article is now linked from one page, maybe find a way to link from two pages.

[paladin]

Alika,
how is the site set up? When you add a new story/article are you letting any sites or search endgines know about it? Are the last-updated dates correct?

-Alon