Our news-sharing campaign: When republishing a story avoid the ‘copycat’ syndrome

Take the missing person story of Renzo Bullhead, who was last seen nearly a month ago in the Bismarck-Mandan area. If the stories written by Buffalo’s Fire on his disappearance were republished by a major Native news outlet — which reaches a larger audience — maybe more people would know what volunteers need and what makes their work challenging.

Buffalo’s Fire offers accurate information on this story because it is local, is committed to integrity and press freedom, and because one of the volunteer public information officers for the family works in our newsroom.

Sharing is great. This is why we are launching our “Share & Care” campaign and inviting as many publications as possible to pick up this story or join our cause. The importance of doing so becomes clear when considering a lesser-known, darker side of story sharing. Search engines don’t always handle multiple versions of the same article well. When faced with duplicates, they try to decide which version is the original to promote and which ones to discard from search results.

Search engines like Google or Bing use various signals (domain authority, crawl frequency, backlinks) to determine the most relevant and authoritative version of a piece of content.

A larger news site might rank higher for the story, even if they published it later and with the correct visible attribution. They effectively become the “owner” regarding search visibility and traffic.

Search engines tend to display a single version of content at the top of search results. If they cannot determine the original, they consolidate ranking signals to the stronger domain or even filter out what they perceive as duplicates. The paradox is that the original source of the content may be, in the search engine’s, downranked as a “copycat.” While “plagiarized” is a strong term, the effect on the original, smaller publisher can be similar: loss of search visibility and credit for their work. This can happen even if the syndicated version includes a simple link back or byline attribution, as these are weaker signals than technical ones.

There is a solution to this problem: the “canonical link.” This is a tiny snippet of code that readers don’t see when they browse a site, but that is the only clear signal to search engines to determine if the content is original or if it is a copy. Simply put, if the republishing site attributes the content to the original author in the visible byline, it should also do so in the byline that search engines read, which is the canonical link.

Canonical links are not new. They were introduced in February 2009 and are a fundamental, widely supported SEO standard across search engines and publishing platforms. They are very easy to use on almost every CMS.

There is “no good excuse” not to use canonical links. Failing to use them often is related to “not knowing about them,” “forgetting about them” or, in some cases, technical oversight. Sometimes, however, it can be a deliberate attempt by the republisher to capture Google traffic value for themselves.

For a practical how-to on using them, check our sharing content explainer.

It’s vital to use canonical links when republishing content and advocate for their mandatory use when sharing content. Doing so contributes to an ecosystem of local newsrooms that lift each other rather than letting the big fish eat the small ones.

Using canonicals has no negative SEO consequences for the republishing site, but it does have immense importance for the original publication.

At Buffalo’s Fire, we encourage content sharing, but not for all our content. On some articles, you will see an orange button that says “Story Share & Care.” On others, you will see a copyright note. Syndication should serve a purpose (amplifying important stories). Still, it should not be done at the cost of eclipsing a smaller newsroom’s visibility through Google searches for their original content.