SEO - Duplicate Content, when employees blog...

A recent email from a client asked about handling duplicate content:

I know that having duplicate copy is bad but I'm wondering if I can get away with two things:

1. One of our high-tech gurus wants to update his personal blog and have me copy or syndicate the post on our company blog. I have added links and for key words I change his spelling. Will Google ding us if I copy the content of his blog?

2. I would like to set up a wordpress blog and use the copy from our company blog to feed it. My thought is that a blog hosted outside of our website and linked extensively might help us. However, this might cause us problems if Google dings for repeat content issues.

Metrist response:

Suppose we look this question from Google's point of view? They don't want to end up with the same article showing up multiple times on a search engine results page.

By the same token, you will dilute the effectiveness of your linking strategy if you publish the same material in several places. If I'm a blogger and I want to link to your story, to whom should I link? You end up with your own pages being spoilers for building link strength.

While it may be a good idea to utilize the community benefits of publishing on WordPress (or Blogger, etc.), you can get the same effect by putting your corporate blog articles on an RSS Feed from Feedburner, with strong headlines and good relevant meta tags. We have a couple of clients using Feedburner and they were very satisfied with the results. Their content got blogged faster and more often than before.

The issue of your Guru's personal blog + corporate presence is potentially problematic. Ultimately, I'd recommend that it work like Matt Cutts, from Google. He's a Google Employee who blogs independently. Occasionally the Google webmaster blog will summarize a relevant posting from Cutts and point back to Cutts' blog. Essentially you would blog on the Corporate blog about what cool stuff Guru is blogging about, using your keywords to link back to his articles. This also lets you frame what he's talking about in terms of your keywords without having to fight with him about using your chosen language framework. And by "fight", I mean cajole, flatter, remind, and suggest.

Now, it turned out that Matt Cutts weighed in on duplicate content SEO the next day. Cutts responds to a question from a presentation at one of the SES conferences:

I often get questions from whitehat sites who are worried that they might receive duplicate content penalties because they have the same article in different formats ( e.g. a paginated version and a printer-ready version). While it’s helpful to try to pick one of those articles and exclude the other version from indexing, typically a whitehat site doesn’t neet to worry about 1-3 versions of an article on their own site. However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
We use additional heuristics of course, but I figured other people might want to hear that take.

Labels: duplicate content, seo