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It is incredibly common for larger news publications to do three of the following things:
(1) Mention your site, without a link, as the source of the information they are citing.
(2) Link to your site, using a nofollow, as the source of the information they are citing.
(3) Not mention or link to your site, and take credit for discovering the information they are citing.
This is all very common, probably the third option is the most common amongst large news publications.
But for one thing, this is not Google's problem. It is an outreach problem, where you need to speak to the author and try to get them to do right by you. This happens all the time to me on the two sites I write at. Honestly, I don't do the outreach and it no longer bothers me when it happens. It use to, but now it does not.
A tweet by Dan Howdle asked Google's John Mueller what he thought of it:
What's Google's stance on news providers uniformly using nofollow links to cite the source of their story?It just seems… mean.
John's response? That it is "ultimately their decision," and nothing really Google should or can do on the matter. He wrote on Twitter:
@DanHowdle That's ultimately their decision. Maybe they had bad experiences with people trying to drop links like that?
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) September 10, 2015Maybe or maybe it looks bad citing smaller publications and they want to take more credit?
Do you think Google should figure out this non-citation citations and give credit where credit is due?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
