Guidelines for posting FreeAgent content

We’re delighted that you want to share our content on your website, but before you do there are a few steps you should take to ensure that neither of our sites get hit with any of Google’s duplicate content issues.

What is duplicate content?

If a search engine, such as Google, comes across the same content published numerous times on different websites it can have a hard time figuring out which version is the original. Without this information the search engine won’t know which page to show to users and might not show any of the versions.

Simple solution

The simplest solution is to link to the original source so that you don’t affect its ranking position in Google’s search results. For example, if you wish to publish the content from https://www.freeagent.com/guides/making-tax-digital/exemptions/ on your site, you should include a link back to this page.

Ideally, this will be included in a sentence at the beginning of the article such as:

This content was originally published at https://www.freeagent.com/guides/making-tax-digital/exemptions/

Other more technical solutions

For these options, you might need the help of a web developer or digital marketer as they require some technical expertise. If you’re not comfortable with code please stick with the simple solution above.

rel=canonical

A rel=canonical tag sits alongside other code in the head of your webpage as in the example below. For clarity, we’ve removed any other code that might be in there as well:

<head> <link href=”https://www.freeagent.com/guides/making-tax-digital/exemptions/” rel=”canonical”> </head>

“Noindexing”

Another more technical option is to tell the search engines not to include this page in their indexes. Like the rel=canonical instruction above, the ‘noindex’ instruction goes in the head of your pages html code:

<head> <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> </head>

Please don’t hurt us!

We work very hard to come up with content that is useful to you and your clients and while we’re very happy for you to share it around, please make sure that you follow the guidelines above so both your website and ours don’t suffer from any adverse effects.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with your account manager and they will be happy to help.