: Do I need to prevent users from posting duplicate content from elsewhere for SEO on a multi-author blog? I made a multi-author website, where volunteer writers publish articles, and in return

@YK1175434

If you want the content to be original, meaning that they can't publish the articles on their website, then you probably have to offer them something. If they are running their own blogs, a rel-follow backlink to their website on each of their article entries should be quite tempting for them.

If on the other hand you're going to cross post their articles onto your site (with their permission), you're probably going to need the rel=canonical tag.

You can opt not to use the rel=canonical tag and have Google decide which article to index from which site. I don't think you will specifically get a penalty for this. Google may realize that all of your articles are cross posts from elsewhere and decide that your site offers no original content and perhaps derank you substantially. But if you use the canonical tag on these articles, you won't be getting much if any at all search traffic going to those pages.

If your objective is to rank these articles from the authors on Google then you simply can't use the canonical tag. However, you're going to get hit with duplicate content issues.

Overall, to get these authors to agree to give you high quality original articles all to yourself, you'll probably have to offer them something. Then again, look at how long this post of mine is. It's basically an article. And all stackexchange had to offer me to get me to write this stuff was some awesome green points. Perhaps you can offer them points?

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