You can’t control other sites reposting your content. They’ll try and most times get away with it. All you can do is contact them and request that they take down that content as you didn’t authorise them to use it. If that doesn’t work you can contact their hosting provider and place a DCMA complaint against them.
In all of this the canonical tag won’t do help you because the vast majority of sites that copy your content won’t add that tag to their pages, and it’s only useful if it’s on their page. It is a good idea ot add it to your site, but that’s all you can do.
Hi, thanks,
Okay, what if I wanted to syndicate my articles on other sites such as Medium? Would the canonical meta tag help?
If so, where would it go… if were to want it site-wide?
Do you have any control over how the articles are used on the other sites, or are they going to jsut copy-and-paste and include a link back to your site?
The answer is the same. Unless you can add a canonical tag to their site, you can’t do anything about it. Canonical tags only work for the site that they are placed on. If another site doesn’t use them, or uses them incorrectly, you won’t get any benifit whatsoever.
Most of the reputable article sharing sites will enfoce either a link bcak to the authors site, or a canonical tag, but there’s some that don’t. Again, you don’t have control over that once you submit the article, so there’s nothing that you can do about it.
This is why I don’t suggest syndicating articles under most circumstances. I can see why it’s useful for things like press releases, but for general articles it’s now pretty much a waste of time because someone will get hit with duplicate content penalties. If another site that gets indexed faster then yours gets your content indexed first, then your site is seen as copying, even if you didnt, and no tags or links are going to make it look any different.
