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I want to add content from other blogs to my own (with the authors permission) to help build additional relevant content and support articles I've found useful that others have written.

I'm looking into how to do this responsibly - ie, by giving the original content author a boost and not competing against them for search traffic which should go to their site.

In order to keep my duplicate content out of search, and to hint to the search engines where the original content is to be found i've implemented:

  <meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow'>
  <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' />

Additionally, to boost the original article and to let readers know where it came from i'll be adding something like this:

  Article originally written by 
  <a href='http://www.authorswebsite.com'>Authors Name</a> 
  and reproduced with permission.<br/>
  <a href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' target='new'>
  Read the original article here.

All that remains is a way to 'officially' credit the original author in the HTML for the search spiders to see. Can anyone tell me a way to do this possibly using rel="author" (as far as I can see thats only good for my own original content), or perhaps it doesn't matter given that the reproduced pages will be kept out of search engines? Also, have I overlooked anything in the approach?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 25 '11 at 21:11

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3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Instead of using canonical, you should be using rel=author, which will give the original author all credit. It is extremely simple to use tho, but it requires that the original author will give you a link from his/her google profile to end the loop.

you should look at these two videos from Google, they explain it pretty well.

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Perfect, I wanted to implement rel=author but everything i'd seen until those videos seemed to suggest that it was only usable if i'm the author and can add my site onto my own G+ profile. It does look like that's still true, but at least if I implement it on my link - they can claim it their end if they want to. –  Codecraft Nov 24 '11 at 22:05

Hm, perhaps the credits are enough, especially if you have the authors' permission. What I'm saying is that you're not competing with them or stealing their content or whatever, but, if you have a good site, you're actually helping those authors and their works since someone might accidentally end up and find something interesting and then moving on to the author's original website from your link to find more, while if you're not keeping it visible, only people who search for the author and/or their work will find the good content you're offering on your website as well. Just a thought.

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It wouldn't help the original author for a site to duplicate their content and then appear in search; Google will apply the duplicate content penalty (probably to both sites) and people might even see my copy above the original works in rankings, and take traffic away from the author. The benefit of my being able to reproduce content is not for my SEO, but for giving visitors more to read when they arrive at my blog. The articles I write will be searchable and will contribute to my SEO. –  Codecraft Nov 24 '11 at 22:09
Fair enough... rel=author will have to do then. –  Shomz Nov 24 '11 at 22:25

Author is defined with the meta tag:
<meta name="author" content="Bill Gates" />
But what does it matter, you deny search engines to visit your page, and they are the only one who maybe read the canonical link and the author meta.

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search engines ignore that meta tag. –  Jan Dragsbaek Nov 24 '11 at 21:36
Maybe old/little search engines still do it? Did Google EVER read the meta tags like author? It isn't unthinkable that it is made just to make the code look more professional. –  BronzeByte Nov 24 '11 at 21:47
I cannot find any statement about google ever using the author meta tag. –  Jan Dragsbaek Nov 24 '11 at 21:49

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