0

I have a blog post on my site, and then a few months later I got asked by another (much larger) website, if they could put that same post on their website as a guest post.

Seeing as their site is much more popular than mine, I agreed to it, as I was keen to get some extra traffic and publicity.

But could this have affected my search engine ranking due to duplicate content? I was thinking this wouldn't be an issue, because Google indexed my post a few months before the duplicate post was added to the other website.

But I have noticed a drop in my traffic over the last couple years. I suspect there could be a number of reasons fo this, but I am wondering if this could be one of them.

  • See the section on "content syndication" at What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site?. Google doesn't necessarily use "first publish date" to determine which copy to index, sometimes Google goes with the most popular site. When you syndicate content you should always make sure the other site takes steps to ensure that content isn't indexed there, or that Google finds links to the original with each piece of content. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 03 '19 at 11:22
  • @StephenOstermiller thanks for letting me know! I was about to remove the post from my site altogether incase Google had penalized me, but instead I've just set it to noindex... do you think this would be enough or would I need to remove the post entirely? –  Nov 03 '19 at 17:58
  • 1
    Google rarely penalized for duplicate content. It usually just picks one of the duplicates to index. I wouldn't worry about that article hurting the rest of your site. – Stephen Ostermiller Nov 03 '19 at 18:34

0 Answers0