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I am in the scenario where I have my content duplicated over multiple cross domains. I don't want to get penalized for my original site by Google for it. So what is the best option to avoid this. I came to know about the cross linking i.e giving link of my original article at the last of republished articles, is this okay? Is there any standard format of linking like..

Cross posted from: http://myoriginalsite.com/myarticle

Referenced: http://myoriginalsite.com/myarticle

Original article: http://myoriginalsite.com/myarticle

Which of above will be good?

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The best solution is to not have duplicated content :)

Crosslinking is not a good idea either, because from what I understand, you'd do that for search engines and not the users. We would still find the duplicated content and potentially index them, which may result in duplication in the results.

What I'd do is to 301 redirect the unoriginal content to the original one, or if this is not possible, use the canonical link element to hint us which version is the canonical, "original" one.

Here's this Help Center article about rel=canonical, Matt even explains in a few words what it is all about: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

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  • +! nice first answer
    – John Conde ♦
    Jul 10, 2011 at 15:38
  • @methode thanks for reply. Suppose my same content is posted over mysite(original one) and then on weblogs.asp.net and dzone kind of sites. In this case how can I handle the situation? The "rel=canonical" tag is not possible as I am not running their site. Will cross linking help me here?
    – Rocky Singh
    Jul 10, 2011 at 15:47
  • "Not running their site" meaning that you're being scraped or that you're deliberately distributing your own content?
    – methode
    Jul 10, 2011 at 16:07
  • You can say that I can post only content their and the controlling of meta tags is not in my hand. I have a curious thing to ask here, if these sites are not putting rel="canonical" on my republished content, should I stop posting my content on other sites?
    – Rocky Singh
    Jul 10, 2011 at 16:21
  • I still say that you should not duplicate your content. Why would you enrich with your great content some other, random site when you can have it on your own site? Generally one or two links won't turn the world around. If you desperately want to do it, then yes, do link back to your original post as it makes easier for search engines to detect relationships.
    – methode
    Jul 12, 2011 at 19:53

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