how to handle foreign content on a blog (double content)

Question

I'm quitely new to SEO and I don't know how to handle foreign content on a blog.
I am writing content for two different blogs. The subjects of these blogs intersect partially, so there are sometimes situations in which I like to post exactly the same entry on both blogs. On the other hand I often see blogposts with a note like "this post was first published on www.xyz.com".

I thought to avoid the problem with double content I could use a canonical link in both cases. But all I read about using it cross-domain supposes to still have the same website.

So what is the best practice to handle this, by avoiding

1. that the original site doesn't benefit from being the first-posted and
2. that the second site has disadvantages because of containing double content
   

?

edit: I assume the fact that google tries to serve different contents for given keywords. Sites which doesn't seem to be the original one of multiple found content are ranked down, based on the presumption the content was stolen or something else (this correct?). How to prevent this behaviour if content is legally doubled? Would the canonical-link be the right way or isn't there any, bercause it'd be against googles aims?

Answer 1

The canonical tag won't accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. If you have an article on site A with the canonical tag pointing to the same article on site B you are telling Google not to index the article on Site A because it is a duplicate of the article on site B. In other words the original site gets all the benefit and the second site is guaranteed not to show up in the SERPs.

The first thing I'd consider is how much of your content is duplicate, if this happens only occasionally Google is not likely to care however, the more often it happens the more likely it will be a problem.

Really the only solution is to make sure it's not duplicate content, use the same research and write two articles that approach the topic from different perspectives. Or publish the article on one site and then post a short summary on the other with additional resources and information etc.

If they're both popular sites and related to the same topic you may find some of your readers read both and giving them duplicate articles isn't a good experience. That is worth considering in addition to the SEO ramifications.

Answer 2

Canonical is only AFAIK for same-site duplicate content. Basically, when you have the same page with different URLs (which is a common issue), Google doesn't know which one to show for the search results, so the canonical tells Google 'use this one'. This has no effect on separate sites that I know of.

Google has no real way of knowing which site 'posted something first'. They crawl pages in different sites at different times/days and random pages at that, so even if site A posts something on 3/3/2012 and site B copies it and posts it on 3/4/2012, maybe Google crawls the page on site B before they crawl it on site A, so they can't automatically penalize for that (it's more an on-demand thing, when site A accuses site B of copying their content, they investigate and penalize).

In your case what I would do is, if the duplicate posts are common, just mark the page with the copied post as "noindex nofollow" so search engines ignore it (as far as page ranking goes). If it's not a common thing then don't worry about it.