Duplicate content and Press Releases

[Rich-P]

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I've noticed a number of my pages appearing in the supplemental results where I have added an article to my site and then later published it as a press release in the various pr distribution sites. Publishing articles on the PR sites helps with link building but I'm worried I'm being penalised for duplicate content even when the article appears in my site first . This experiment is interesting reading http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Op...oogles-Filter/ can anyone recommend the best approach?

[amanda1]

I don't actually know the answer. However we post rotating weekly press releases on our site and when we post these again through other affiliate blogs, etc. we always change the copy slightly to be on the safe side.

Best Wishes,

Amanda Hayes

[getvisible]

It's always the problem. I know people don't like PR, but what's your homepage PR and how many links deep are the pages on your site?

I'd recommend changing the boilerplate on the one on your site and create an introduction to it above (which is different from the other press releases).

Also, if you can, I'd make the navigation on each page as distinct from the rest of the page as possible - even create links to searches or information pages distinct to the topic of the press release. If you can, add a couple of links out to on-topic, authority sites (but you've got to be imaginative about the placement).

Could you also do a latest news feature which rotates some snippets of other information on your site on those pages?

When it comes to linking, is it possible for you to link to the latest 10 press releases (automatically) on your homepage (assuming this is the destiniation of most of your on-topic inbound links)?

Any other questions, drop me a line.

[Brendon]

>> I've noticed a number of my pages appearing in the supplemental results where I have added an article to my site and then later published it as a press release in the various pr distribution sites

This is what's known as a "canonical URLissue" - effectively, which version is considered to be the most authoratitive? If you are going supplemental, it ain't you.... That's fixable, but you need to establish your site as a stronger authority than G currently see it as, or at least those pages that are being "demoted" to the Supp. Index

[Damion76]

I'm sorry to disagree with you Brendon but the issue isn't related to canonical URLs.

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad...onicalization/

Quote=Matt Cutts
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

* www.example.com
* example.com/
* www.example.com/index.html
* example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Rich is experiencing is because most likely he has written an article and immediately put out a Press release, the PR site get's crawled first by Google and recognized as the origin as the article hasn't been firstly crawled on Rich's site.
Or if not immediately basically the PR site has been crawled first.

So what can you do about it?
Make sure your article is being crawled and preferably indexed before putting out a Press release. It's not a 100% bullet proof way but it seems like the only solution to make sure you're recognized as the origin of the article.

What Rich is experiencing is not a technical issue or canonical related.

[Brendon]

Damion76, this IS a canonicalisation issue. Things are more complicated because it's a cross-domain one, rather than the rather basic example Matt cites in that piece you quoted. The clue is here :

" we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set"

Although in the example all the URLs belong to the same root domain, there's no particular reason that they HAVE to be in the same root domain for a canonical struggle to ensue. To a search engine, domains are merely convenient ways of associating several URLs to one another, not distinct entities in the way they are to the respective webmasters.

>> Make sure your article is being crawled and preferably indexed before putting out a Press release.

Actually, in this case it would make no difference at all. When G see multiple copies of the same data, they decide which is the "best", NOT which is the original. G don't care who was first with an article / press release / whatever, just who has the most authoritative version.

That's why you see the described behavior of a page being indexed, then being moved to the Supp index. The gap between the article being published and released on PR services could be months - if one of the PR sites has more juice than you, you lose, and your version goes supplemental

[Damion76]

>>Although in the example all the URLs belong to the same root domain, there's no particular reason that they HAVE to be in the same root domain for a canonical struggle to ensue. To a search engine, domains are merely convenient ways of associating several URLs to one another, not distinct entities in the way they are to the respective webmasters.<<

It all comes down to one domain Brendon, the ROOT domain.
Canonical issues has nothing to whatsoever with other domains.

If you have not taken measures for instance that all incoming links are redirected to the www version of your domain, to pick one scenario and preference, and an incoming link would be without the www attached in the incoming link, then that would be a canonical issue related to the Root domain. As it would be counted as a link to another page while the page is actually the same.
But it still relates and comes down how the ROOT domain handles incoming links.

Rich hasn't even mentioned the nature of his incoming links if he has them for that matter, but you're already implying that his page going supplemental is a canonical related issue?
Should he have an amount of backlinks of various nature described in Matt's post then Google would have issues to credit the right URL and his page would go supplemental.

Your following paragraph is more something i can relate to.

>>When G see multiple copies of the same data, they decide which is the "best", NOT which is the original. G don't care who was first with an article / press release / whatever, just who has the most authoritative version.<<

Perhaps a better strategy would be to build some backlinks first to the article and then to do a press release.
Should he do this then he has more chance to even get a good ranking but also to prevent his page to go supplemental.

But canonical issues can never be cross domain related, it's all handled on the root domain and without knowing if Rich has implemented 301 redirects for non-www to www or vice versa it's way premature to say it is canonical related.

Authority as you described sounds more plausible.

[Brendon]

>> But canonical issues can never be cross domain related

... so what's the basis of the 302 pagejack then?

[getvisible]

from Matt Cutts.

[QUOTE]Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.[/url]

[Damion76]

>> But canonical issues can never be cross domain related

... so what's the basis of the 302 pagejack then?

Okay, okay l That 's also based on a wrong URL being picked.
Is this still an issue then? I thought this was already solved by Google's engineers?

But in Rich's case giving a first diagnosis of a canonical problem is still beyond me how you could say this...without knowing more about the site?

[Brendon]

>> I've noticed a number of my pages appearing in the supplemental results where I have added an article to my site and then later published it as a press release in the various pr distribution sites.

Classic cross-domain canonical selection behavior. Content is added and indexed, then is subsequently moved to Supp. index following syndication. Granted, I can't be 100% sure it's what's going on without specifics, but unless there's some critical piece of info that's been withheld from the original post, it's (in my opinion anyway) the most likely explanation for the described behaviour

>>> I thought this was already solved by Google's engineers?

Yeeeeaaaah, don't believe everything you read... I have deep respect for Google as an information retrieval organisation, but to be honest, they are a bit crap at search. I'm not convinced most of those PhDs really understand the WWW (which SOUNDS paradoxical, but think about it)

[getvisible]

mate.

Do you have the same content in <title>, Meta description and Meta keywords?

[Rich-P]

Hi all,

Thanks for all the advice, it's greatly appreciated, and apologies for the late reply, I got roped into a stag do and am only just recovering ;-) and returning to the laptop!!

The articles in questions are here: http://www.broadband-expert.co.uk/br...news/index.php

and here: http://www.broadband-expert.co.uk/blog/

Cheers,
Rich

[rolypoly]

exactly the same title, description and other starting paragraph may just trigger google to stop coming back to crawl your site.