Can being first to publish negate duplication penalty?

Hi guys.

I have a website that derives 100% of its content from outside contributors.

A lot of contributors to our website also want to republish their articles elsewhere. How badly will this hurt us in terms of duplicate content penalties from Google?

One possible solution is to ask for a period of exclusivity. For example, we can ask the contributors to grant my website the exclusive right to publish the article for 10 days, and that only after 10 days may they submit their writing to other websites (or post it on their own blogs).

Will this extra 10 days soften (or even negate) the duplicate content penalty from Google? Would 30 days be better?

Google indexes our site on a daily basis, so would being the first to publish tell Google that we are the first ones to publish so they should not penalize us?

The best solution is of course to NOT allow ANY republication. But I think if we do that we will get a lot less contributions.

Thank you for your input.

 

30 would probably be much better but I think it would be hard to get someone to agree to that. I always publish articles on my site first before submitting an abridged version of the article to article distribution a few weeks later. Therefore my site is seen as the source by google.

 

I have managed to get articles I have used from other sites to rank higher than the original articles. The original articles were on the net a good 3/4 years before. This doesn't help you with regard to dup content penalty, but is still interesting.

Notting

 

Thank you guys. Your personal experiences are very helpful!

 

If your site has a STRONG link profile, then it will not matter if the content is found elsewhere.

Having a 10 day, or 30 day, exclusivity agreement will be hard to enforce. Are you going to manually check each submission a few times each during that period? Too time consuming. You could create an automated bot to do it, but is it worth it? And what do you do when you find one breaking your agreement?

My recommendation would be to build up your backlinks till you are an "Authority Site". Keep a 30 day exclusivity agreement and assume most may actually adhere to it, don't worry too much about those that don't.

 

Thanks axemedia. That's a very balanced approach. I like that.

 

I agree, look how many sites use content from wikipedia.

 

Not true unfortunately. I just spent all of last week in a Search Engines Seminare in NYC. Google does not give credit to the site that published the article first. The most trusted most authoritative site gets credit for the content, lesser sites are considered dupe content.