Duplicate Content between content and corporate site

[realcontent]

Hi all,

I have a question about a site that wants to use content from another site. The use of the content by the second site is for legitimate editorial reasons.

Usually, I assume, you tell the creator of the content that the site they are giving the content to must link back to the originating page that content is from. The alternative is using the canonical tag back to the originating page.

But what if the second site wants to use that content as only a portion of the total content of different pages: say, they are getting 3 paragraphs, but it will be mixed in with other content. How does the content originator resolve any duplicate content issues in a case like this?

The site asking for the content is a large corporate site. My goal is to make sure the content creator remains seen as the originator of the content.

Thank you!

[ZydoSEO]

My opinion... I'm sure others will have different opinions.

Usually, I assume, you tell the creator of the content that the site they are giving the content to must link back to the originating page that content is from.

Very few would ever agree to this. Especially if you are talking about thousands of pages of content. Those that would agree would most likely insist on NOFOLLOWing those links to your site which means the the links would not be included in the search engines' link graphs rendering them useless as proof that your site was the originator. The engines wouldn't know they were linking back to your content if the links are flagged NOFOLLOW.

The alternative is using the canonical tag back to the originating page. But what if the second site wants to use that content as only a portion of the total content of different pages: say, they are getting 3 paragraphs, but it will be mixed in with other content.

This is not what the canonical link element was meant to be used for IMO. It was never meant to be used to indicate authorship or ownership. It was meant to resolve URL canonicalization issues and duplicate content issues within your OWN site or across multiple sites that you might own. It's certainly not meant to indicate that your site owns or is the originator of a "portion" of the original content on some other corporate page. The corporation would be idiots if they were ever to agree to this as they would essentially be transfering credit not only for the content of their pages over to your pages, but also for all of their pages' internal and external inbound links over to your pages.


The only way that I would let a corporation republish my content on their site while I continue to maintain the original version on my site would be...

The corporate site would ONLY be allowed to iframe my content by referencing URLs on my site that rendered the content without any of my site's navigation.

This would allow the corporate site's users to consume my content at the corporate site's URLs, but my content (because it is iframed on the corpoarte pages with SRC="my urls") would not be seen by the engines as part of the corporate pages.

[realcontent]

ZydoSEO - great response; I appreciate your in-depth reply. I would imagine the corporate site would also be negative on iframed content...are there ever situations where the content is buried enough on the page with other text that it is ignored by the search engines altogether?

[jimbeetle]

Just curious, what is the exact realtionship between the two sites?