meta tags

WP Original Source Plugin

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January 24  |  Wordpress SEO  |   Ryan Clark

We’ve been having problems with a site scraping out content (onewaylinkbuilder.com), and we’re not having any luck contacting them. Their web host won’t do anything, we’ve already resorted to replacing images to naughty ones, but alas no luck.What’s even worse, is sometimes the content is outranking our site, and even their blog is showing up in Google Blog Search instead of ours…frustrating to say the least.

Google recently launched two new meta tags for content publishers, and now there is a WordPress plugin for it! Thanks to the handy coding work of Thibaut Dancette from Wecho.com who published this handy plugin for us WP users. You can grab WP Original Source HERE, and it installs easily without any modification.

I’ll update this post later to report back on how it’s effectively working, so keep your fingers crossed for us. Content scraping is more rampant than ever so it’s nice to know there are efforts on Google’s end to help clean up the junk. If their webspam team is listening, I’d love to see a anti-scraping feature built into Feed Burner to help combat these problems.

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Google Is Testing Two New Meta Tags For Content Syndication

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November 18  |  News  |   Ryan Clark

It’s about bloody time Google! A lot of people this past year have seen their own content get outranked by other, highly authoritative syndication sites which has been causing a brouhaha. There are also a lot of mashup sites in the mix which are pretty much entirely syndicated content which I feel is fine as long as the source is credited, and now that won’t be a problem. This is going to be a major relief to a lot of content owners out there, lets hope it works out properly so these meta tags stick around. I’m going to be playing with them on our site, as well get some of our clients to look into implementation so I can bring back some stats and more details.

  • syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we’re asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:
    <meta name="syndication-source" content="http://www.publisherX.com/wire_story_1.html">
  • original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:
    <meta name="original-source" content="http://www.example.com/burglary_at_watergate.html">

I’m really pleased that they’ve introduced these two because even my own content is getting out ranked by aggregator sites. I get a lot of my posts picked up by Top SEO News, which I’m grateful for, but as you can see they’re outranking my own post which pisses me off. Again, this is Google’s problem, not the folks who run the site. The post I’m talking about was my recent Knowem.com review, which you can see below is getting sauced in the SERPs….booooo!

Take note that Google states, “Although these meta tags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away”, so I’m not sure how long before I can tell any difference. I guess the only course of action for webmasters at the moment is to just keep watching the SERPs and take note of any new behavior.

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Google Is Testing Two New Meta Tags For Content Syndication

Comments Off on Google Is Testing Two New Meta Tags For Content Syndication
November 18  |  News  |   Ryan Clark

It’s about bloody time Google! A lot of people this past year have seen their own content get outranked by other, highly authoritative syndication sites which has been causing a brouhaha. There are also a lot of mashup sites in the mix which are pretty much entirely syndicated content which I feel is fine as long as the source is credited, and now that won’t be a problem. This is going to be a major relief to a lot of content owners out there, lets hope it works out properly so these meta tags stick around. I’m going to be playing with them on our site, as well get some of our clients to look into implementation so I can bring back some stats and more details.

  • syndication-source indicates the preferred URL for a syndicated article. If two versions of an article are exactly the same, or only very slightly modified, we’re asking publishers to use syndication-source to point us to the one they would like Google News to use. For example, if Publisher X syndicates stories to Publisher Y, both should put the following metatag on those articles:
    <meta name="syndication-source" content="http://www.publisherX.com/wire_story_1.html">
  • original-source indicates the URL of the first article to report on a story. We encourage publishers to use this metatag to give credit to the source that broke the story. We recognize that this can sometimes be tough to determine. But the intent of this tag is to reward hard work and journalistic enterprise. For example, to credit the publication that broke a story you could use a metatag like this:
    <meta name="original-source" content="http://www.example.com/burglary_at_watergate.html">

I’m really pleased that they’ve introduced these two because even my own content is getting out ranked by aggregator sites. I get a lot of my posts picked up by Top SEO News, which I’m grateful for, but as you can see they’re outranking my own post which pisses me off. Again, this is Google’s problem, not the folks who run the site. The post I’m talking about was my recent Knowem.com review, which you can see below is getting sauced in the SERPs….booooo!

Take note that Google states, “Although these meta tags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away”, so I’m not sure how long before I can tell any difference. I guess the only course of action for webmasters at the moment is to just keep watching the SERPs and take note of any new behavior.

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