Will I get penalized by Google for duplicate content?

You might have heard someone say that using duplicated content will get you penalized and banished from Google.

However, that’s actually a myth  

(as long as you do it the right way)

The official name for the duplicate content strategy is Content Syndication

And it’s perfectly OK.

In fact, Content Syndication is a strategy used by some of the biggest websites in the world (including Huffington Post, Lifehacker and Fast Company) as part of their Content Strategy.

Here’s a great article from AHREFs that runs through the process much deeper. 

Content Syndication works incredibly well for it’s intended purposes which is to get existing articles in front of new audiences AND to for someone viewing the website to see that it has has fresh/relevant content (because there’s nothing worse than seeing a Blog with the latest entry being 3 years ago – like lots of MSP website currently do)

However, Content Syndication is NOT about trying to get SEO juice.

You need Unique Content for to get SEO juice and whilst we’d love to be able to write unique content for every single one of our members, we’d need to increase your membership fees to something like $2,000 per month to make it work  

(to get 6 unique high quality blog posts along with everything else that is included like the social media images, social media text and the layup email will typically cost you between $1,000 and $3,000 per month, depending on where you are and the quality of articles you want)

To help Google better understand that these Blog Posts that you are publishing on your site are originating from elsewhere we have created a generic / unbranded website called thetechnologypress.com

Every article that we write for you, we publish on that site and so Google recognizes thetechnologypress.com as the Primary Source. That way if you post the same content (using the 2 x steps below), Google will know that you’re doing Content Syndication.

So, to make sure you do Content Syndication the right way, there are 2 main things you need to do when you post each article.

1. Create a link back to the original Source Article with something like “Republished with Permission from The Technology Press” (we already have a link like this in the Article for you)
2. Put a Rel=”Canonical” tag in your Article headers linking back to the original Source Article (this is VERY EASY)

These two things help to make sure you don’t get on the bad side of Google.

If you want to be extra careful, you could also use the NoIndex tag on each article post, however most SEO experts will tell you that it’s not needed AND a lot of search engines don’t honor that tag anyway.

So to sum up – if you attribute correctly with both those steps, Google will have no problems recognizing that you’re doing Content Syndication here and you’ll still get all the benefit of having a Blog that has fresh content posted on it up to 6 times per month.

Enjoy