Guest blogs: if you dupe on your own site, add a canonical link

In addition to the etiquette of not duplicating your guest post for another blog on your own blog, consider the fact that search engines do not reward publishing duplicate content. In fact, it can be positively detrimental to your search engine optimisation efforts to have duplicate content published.

What is a canonical page? Why specify a canonical page?

One of the benefits of writing a guest post on another blog is so that you can link back to your blog and gain search engine rankings. If the article you write is duplicated exactly on your blog, search engines will sense that there’s duplicate content and penalise both pages. This isn’t good for you, nor the blog you guest posted on.

If you want your audience to be able to see the article on your blog, then one way to circumnavigate the duplicate content issue is to add a canonical link tag to the page on your site. The canonical link tag would look like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.otherdomain.com/where-you-guest-posted.html”&gt;

This way, you’re saying to search engines: “This is duplicate content, but the other page is the one you should index — it’s the ‘original’ article.” You can’t call your own page the ‘original’ unless you put the canonical link tag on the other blog, and that’s probably hard for you to achieve. So by putting it on your page, at least you avoid the potential penalty from serach engines for duplicate content.

With all that said and done, do you actually need the article on your blog as well? It’s much better etiquette to simply link to the other blog and they will undoubtedly link back to you and appreciate your sense of etiquette: reputation enhanced!

Check out this excellent resource in the link below:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Thanks to Y J Tso at http://ca.linkedin.com/in/sepiariver for the orginal idea.