Setting rel=canonical for an individual Blogger post

Question

I wrote a story on Slashdot, and would like to copy-paste it to my company's Blogger blog, as it is very much on-purpose and will interest the readers (most of whom don't read Slashdot).

PROBLEM: I am afraid Google will strike the blog for duplicate content.

The solution is usually canonicalization: inserting this line in the story's blog page:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://slashdot.com/thestory">

This tells Google that all credits of this story goes to Slashdot, and that I am not trying to play dirty SEO tricks by replicating Slashdot's content.

But how do I insert such a line using Blogger?
If I put it in the template, it will apply to he whole blog (which would be even worse), instead of the individual story.

Answer 1

Edit your template.

Add

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "POST-URL"'>>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://slashdot.com/thestory">
</b:if>

making the obvious substitution for POST-URL

Answer 2

I'm no SEO expert, but Google often cross-posts articles between its various blogs. All they seem to do is put

Cross posted from <a href="http://myothersite">myothersite</a>

at the beginning of the article. An example of an original article and a cross-posted article from two of Google's blogs. It seems like as long as you link to the original site, you should be fine.

Answer 3

You shouldn’t use rel-canonical in your case.

Why? Because the content of the two pages it not the same.

Even if we’d ignore that things like the navigation, site header etc. differ, the two pages differ because of the comments. The Slashdot post will have other comments than the Blogger post.

For rel-canonical it is required that the content is the same or a superset, which is not the case for you:

The target (canonical) IRI MUST identify content that is either duplicative or a superset of the content at the context (referring) IRI.

Alternative? Link from your Blogger post to the Slashdot post. If you like, you could blockquote it, too (and using the cite attribute to denote the original source URL). Search engines may decide that it’s duplicate content, but they won’t penalize the site. They will simply choose one version (typically the first one they index). But again, because the comments differ, search engines could probably index both posts, too.