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View Full Version : Posting News on a Blog



Aaron Hats
10-25-2008, 03:45 PM
Is it ok to post news from another site on your blog? I don't want to get dinged for duplicate content but relevant news story about hats would be good for my readers.

Aaron

greenoak
10-25-2008, 08:43 PM
id like to hear more about this too....
seems like the political blgs do that all the time, with links....
ann

orion_joel
10-25-2008, 08:59 PM
I watched a video from google it self not that long ago that dispelled the idea they don't like duplicate content. It more so said that duplicate content is ok as long as the site adds additional value. So if you had the exact same html file on two sites and it was identical then you may get a hit from it. However if the site adds sufficient additional value then it wont be affected really.

However this being said if you really don't want to take the risk in this, it could be worth just having a few lines of the article and a link people can follow if they wish to read more.

Harold Mansfield
10-25-2008, 09:30 PM
I post excerpts from news articles all the time.
I always quote the source, and give additional links to supporting articles.
Just copying and pasting is not cool, it is best to rewrite most of it in your own words, with your own spin unless you belong to a news agency and are licensed to re post complete articles.

vangogh
10-26-2008, 04:53 AM
It really depends on how much content you're grabbing from the news source and the way you're presenting it. Also what are your goals for your post.

If it's a single news story that you want to call your readers attention to the simple thing is to write a sentence or two about the news item, why you think people should read it sort of thing, and maybe pull a quote from the story. Then link to it and let your readers read the original. Your readers will be happy, the site that wrote the news story will be happy, and you'll be happy for making both of them happy.

Just don't expect to get search traffic to your post, or really much of any other traffic. That's a post you write simply to direct your readers to something you think they should see.

If you do want people reading things on your blog and you do want traffic you should really look for ways to add something to the original story. You could write your own commentary on the original news and quote it throughout. You could find several different sources for the news story and mention where they agree and disagree. You'd still want to link to the original sources, but you'd have something original on your blog to keep readers and pull traffic.

When quoting another source be careful about how much you quote. It's ok to copy a block from the original and present it as a quote making it clear where the content came from, but you don't want to quote the entire story.

If on the other hand you found a site that has a lot of good news and you want to present that news on your blog on a consistent basis and that source publishes a feed, you could build an rss reader into your site that displays the headline of the last 5 or 10 posts. The headlines would link back to the original story. Maybe you'd also display a sentence or paragraph from the original too.

You might place the rss reader in a sidebar and you should be able to combine the feeds from several sources and depending on how the other sites have their feeds set up you might be able to present news items from certain sections.