Avoiding Duplicate Content Penalty from Google

One of our customers is getting into the business of producing quality reference-able content for their customer’s website.
So, the modus operandi will be, each article will first get published on their own website, and then one or more customers can publish the same article on their website. Not only this, simultaneously some other big publishers can also publish the same article.

First question is, why are they doing so and does it make a legitimate business case?

Our customer,about whom I am talking here, is a well established lead generation company. They have hired top quality writers & editorial team for generating content. On an average an article costs them 750$. If they keep these articles only on their own website it will become financially unviable. To make it financially viable they have decided to give these articles on rent to multiple websites, with clear instructions of :

1. They will not use these articles to get traffic from search engines
2. They will use these articles for serving their existing customer base
3. They can use these articles in Social Media
4. They can use these articles in their news-letters & other content marketing activity

We came up with a detail content syndication policy, which ensures Google & other search engines don?t punish them for content duplication. This framework laid down rules of engagement for all secondary publishers. Key elements of this framework are:

1. Use NoIndex in their header
2. Don?t use Nofollow in their header
3. Use Rel=?Canonical? ?Original URL?
4. Use 1 link at the bottom of the article saying ?This article was originally published at ?? ?

Note: We normally tell our customers to avoid getting into such scenarios, but sometimes business viability overpowers SEO best practices 🙂