Outbound Link Strategy for Citing Sources

When citing the source of an article, is it best to hyperlink it?

[osXBasics]

Hi All. Let me start by saying I am not as much of a newbie my profile would suggest. I post regularly under another name that my company uses and have been to several pubcons, but as I am posting regarding a site I am managing on the personal side I thought it better to create a new profile.

So onto the question. I am managing an informational site that contains both original and syndicated content. It's not scraping, it's not MFA (doesn't have Adsense at all), it's genuinely useful content that our readers continuously show interest in. It's found and added by hand, at a rate of 1 or 2 (at most) articles a day.

In the interest of transparency, and in the interest of providing credit to the original author we provide a URI (note: not a link)to the originating URI. For example, we'll say "This article written by Walter Writer posted at http://www.example.com/widgets/blueWidgets.html"

Currently we are not linking that URL and it's the subject of great debate. For our users it makes sense to link it(yes, I know what Adam would say). Yet we are concerned that a) a large enough proportion of outbound vs. inbounds could hurt us, regardless of usefulness or relevance and b) this eliminates any doubt on the engines' part that this is not original content. We're pretty ok with that, in so much that we are in no way trying to take credit for the content-- only for the work done to find, syndicate, categorize it and package it for the benefit of our visitors. Still, it's a bit spooky to just flat out admit it.

I know this spans a few topics and could go into quite a few of the forums, but the root of my question is "do we link the outbounds" so I thought I would toss it up to the linking experts.

[edited by: martinibuster at 6:33 pm (utc) on Jan. 8, 2007]
[edit reason] Please use EXAMPLE.COM for example URLs. That's what it is for. Thanks. :) [/edit]

[buckworks]

What are the original authors specifying when they grant permission to use their content?

[osXBasics]

Most of it is obtained via press releases and other (dare I say) open source content. Again, nothing is scraped or even reproduced if the legitimacy is of doing so is even in question. The content is very visible to our users and would be quite obvious if we were doing anything unethical.

[jamesthorn]

I saw your post so I want to jump in here,

I think I have a similar problem, I use, (with permission) News from another Specialist News site, their content and we got a high ranking for it ….

We’re still 2 on Yahoo but on Google dropped from 10 to nowhere..

Am I a victim of duplicate content?

[osXBasics]

Well, we definitely have duplicate content, and we're fine with that. In Vegas I talked to a few Googlers of varying heights on the totum pole and the answer was unanimously "we don't mind if it's duplicate, as long as it's value-added we're going to like it".

I suppose I believe that, but there's little room for error, since the line between syndicating and scraping is razor thin. It's because of this that I am a little paranoid about putting a roadmap on each page to the original source. As it is now, it's transparent to our users that the content is not original but we're not spelling it out to the engines.

I'd love to pretend that I am just waxing philosophy on journalistic ethics here, but what I really want to know is will this bork me in the end? We're kind of on thin ice here with how the engines perceive what we're doing but at the end of the day it's good for our visitors so we're resolute to do it, but do it right, hence the focus on what is probably a small but critical detail.