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Category: Technical Web Development
When you write content on your site, whether it’s a blog post, product description, or an article, you likely want to rank well for it. I’m often asked how best to ensure this when you’re also syndicating that content.
Why Syndicate?
There are good reasons for syndicating content. Syndication can bring traffic, exposure, and sales.
If you’re a blogger, you might syndicate your posts to get wider distribution. If your posts are seen by a bigger audience, you might gain some of those readers for yourself. If your site provides authoritative resources, you might have a partnership with other sites that want to include that content. And if you sell products, you might provide affiliates with content feeds, which in turn brings in additional revenue.
But What Should Rank?
But from a search engine perspective, syndication can cause a bit of a conundrum. If what you wrote is a relevant result for a search, the search engine wants to show it to the searcher. But not show it twice (or three times, or maybe even a thousand times in the case of an affiliate feed). And that makes sense. If you’re searching for something, you don’t want multiple results that all lead to the same content even if that content is on different sites.
So what’s a search engine to do?
Search engines generally identify duplicate results and filter out all but one. They have lots of ways to decide which version to show. They try to figure out which one is the “original” by looking at things like which version was published first and which has the most links pointing to it.
Your content may appear on other sites at times other than when you syndicated it (such as when your RSS feed has been scraped), and search engines try to account for that too by looking at things like which site is more authoritative.
What If Search Engines Get It Wrong?
Generally, search engine algorithms work pretty well and your original version shows up. However, the system isn’t perfect. Michael Gray recently noted that sometimes Google gets it wrong and shows the version from a more authoritative site, even when that is not the original version. He suggested some ways for making sure that the original version shows up first. And he linked to the Search Illustrated column on Search Engine Land that shows a great illustration of how search engines determine the version to show.
How Can You Make Sure Your Site Ranks First?
So what do I suggest you do if you’re syndicating content but want your original version to rank about the syndicated ones?
- Create a different version of the content to syndicate than what you write for your own site. This method works best for things like product affiliate feeds. I don’t think it works as well for things like blog posts or other types of articles. Instead, you could do something like write a high level summary article for syndication and a blog post with details about that topic for your own site.
- Always include absolute links back to your own site in the body of the article. This is particularly helpful when your content is scraped.
- Ask your syndication partners to block their version of your article (via robots.txt or a robots meta tag). Whenever I suggest this, people laugh and tell me that the sites they are syndicating to would never agree to this as they want the content so they can rank for it. I can completely understand this. But as someone who’s providing your content for syndication, you should then just realize you’re in a competition with your syndication partners for ranking and it’s quite possible they can outrank you. If you are able to, put together a syndication agreement that states they get your content as a benefit for their readers, not as a way to acquire search traffic for that content, then you can keep control of ranking for what you’ve written and they can provide a benefit to their audience.
But Make Sure Duplication Is the Issue
In Michael’s case, he explained that he has an agreement with Web Pro News that enables them to syndicate any blog post of his that they’d like for their own site. And in the case he describes, the article on the Web Pro News site is ranking above the version on his blog. He speculates that’s because Web Pro News is a more authoritative site. I am sure that what he describes can happen (particularly since in this case, his Web Pro News version of the article doesn’t have a link back to his original article; at the very least, he should negotiate an introductory paragraph at the beginning of his syndicated posts that explain where the original is located with a link to it, not only for search engine ranking purposes, but to give readers better content), but in his particular case, I’m not so sure that’s the cause.
I can’t find his original post indexed at all. Obviously, if a page isn’t indexed, it has no chance of ranking. I’m not sure why that particular page isn’t indexed. It’s not blocked with robots.txt or a robots meta tag. It sounds like he can see it indexed, so maybe I’m hitting a different data center. If that’s the case, I don’t know if the one I’m hitting was refreshed more recently than the one he’s hitting or if his is.
Don’t Give Away Your Control
His point that syndicating content can be tricky if you want to rank for that content remains, even if the root cause of his particular case is a bit hazy. If search is not yet a large acquisition channel for your site, then you may not mind if another site ranks for your material as you may get more traffic from the syndicated site (so make sure you at least have a link back to your site!). But as you site starts to stand on its own and search traffic starts growing, you will want to have more control. So think of your longer term strategy when you negotiate syndication partnerships and don’t give up all of the control of the content you work so hard to create to others.
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Vanessa, as you know, I work at Tribune as their in-house SEO Manager. Tribune owns over 50 sites and of those at least a dozen of them have high authority, popularity, and have a common theme among them (i.e. relevancy)–that theme being news.
In essence we syndicate to ourselves. This is a problem for duplicate content (not to mention the canonicalization duplicate content, which I will set aside at the moment). The seperate domains are all under seperate financials and thus they aren’t (currently) willing to noindex pages where they ‘borrow’ content from another domain. We have implemented steps to help give higher authority to the ‘original source’ but the only way this seems to impact the algorithm enough to be effective is causing an impact on our Google News. Considering we are a news company, this is not preferred.
Feel free to analyze our current implementation and provide feedback publicly. You can IM me for specific examples if you wish. I simply can’t be too open on this subject but have no issues with you doing some case studies on it as we are a significant example of this problem.
Thanks,
Brent D. Payne
Brent,
What are your goals with this syndication? Do you want the “original” version to rank and all the syndicated versions to be suppressed?
What is the impact you are seeing in Google News?
Vanessa,
I need to use caution in how much information I share.
We simply want the original source to rank the highest. We’ve tried several iterations and the current iteration is the only one that worked on a widespread basis. However, it is causing issues with Google News. I can’t share what those problems are publicly. I’m walking a fine line here.
Do some queries in both Google Web and Google News and you’ll see the problems fairly quickly. I can’t get any more detailed. Sorry.
IM me.
Brent
Hi Vanessa
I have been writing about linking back to permalink for over a year, and I think it goes in one ear and out the other with many SEOs.
Web Pro News have been syndicating my content for over a year, and since the very beginning I arranged for them to include a permalink back to the original for every article.
Web Pro News also often change the title of articles – that is great, because then it sometimes picks up traffic for different search terms.
You can also do the reverse (I know it sounds strange) and block the original article with robots.txt. It can rank based upon the incoming links alone (if it received a lot), and you can get a second listing for your syndicated copy.
Linking back to the original is also a good way to handle conventional, been around since before Google, Article Marketing.
I don’t like the idea of spinning articles, I think that is trying to fool the engines too much and will eventually be caught, even if it is just rotating paragraphs, but have had good results linking back to an original article for comments.
With Web Pro News, every time they pick up an article I see traffic coming back to my site, and because they land on the original article, people see all the great comments, and often stick around.
Comments are also a great way to differentiate the original from the syndicated copy.
p.s. not sure when you removed the registration requirement to comment, but glad you did
Great piece, V.
Even though it’s based on blog/article syndication, you mention product data feeds, and I can’t help but think it doesn’t fully address some of the issues you and I have discussed previously regarding the idea of co-brands and partnerships built around shared content.
In your tips “How Can You Make Sure Your Site Ranks First?” rewriting product content presents a huge scalability issue. I agree that you don’t have distribute *all* of your product data, or can mash it up slightly to present it differently, but what if the partnership is based on the quality of ALL of your content?
I still maintain that the original source will almost always be ranked lower, and (perhaps mathematically, but not rightly so) by SE’s if they are in fact only going off authority weight, and the syndicating site is more established.
Then I think there’s a secondary issue of page layouts/designs – what if one version is simply better optimized than the other 10 versions and there’s less flexibility for the original publisher to fix?
Why would more powerful/established partners agree that showing only a portion of product data is ok from a business standpoint? I agree that you may be able to make some of these conditions at the contractual stage, but the smaller guy almost always loses this fight. I just don’t see that as a practical option.
Vanessa, Keeping a permalink back to the original article and not indexing the syndicated content are both great ways to ensure preference on the SERPs for the original article. Let me add my two cents to this.
I have experienced that when the original article is propagated on the social media, while the same article is being syndicated to other sites, it gets preference more on the SERPS.
i.e One should make sure that while the original article is being published, all the social media (Digg, Delicious and other array of social bookmarkers),should first index the original article before the syndicated version on another site. So when you have pointers from digg,youtube, twitter and facebook (they are a mix of follows and no follows), the original content is getting athe first rank for an exact keyword match.
This may be because of the incoming links from them or due to the authority sharing. And Digg has been particularly performing good at this.
This might not be a general phenomena however.
Linking back to original content works the best with Google. Matt also told the same thing.
A very important factor is where the search engines found the content first. So publish regularly, offer a feed, ping all those ping-services and get some decent backlinks to make sure G,Y,M,etc. send their bots to you on a regular basis.
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Great post Vanessa! I am on my way to implenting these strategies as we speak… Thanks a bunch.
Will some one please tell me, if it’s such a good idea to syndicate exactly same content that we have on our blog to other places. Won’t it lead to content duplication?
Secondly, does number of keyword anchor text play important role in the ranking of the syndicated copies. I mean, What’s the difference between a syndicated article with one back link to the original copy and the other with 6 outlinks (keyword anchor text) to the same original copy? Which one makes sense?
Hi Vanessa!
Thanks for autographing the note paper for my cohort Toni C. at the last seminar – I wasn’t able to be there (the head SEO dude isn’t allowed out to play…) so it was a real kick to get your autograph that way!
Anyhow, this is a great blog post – syndication is a huge and hot topic lately and people need to know the caveats like this.
In line with this I just posted a simple article at my blog on The trouble with owning multiple domain names and pointing them at the same content ( something many of us in the SEO world know but – my audience is generally small business owners who are trying to figure out the SEO and SEM world on their own) and gave a link to your article here because they’re so related…
don’t know that you need the extra link-love given how you’ve got an authority ranking in the hundreds at Technorati and I’ve got a lowly ranking of 1, but hey – I’m really new to the blog world and figure it can’t hurt to acknowledge the real gurus!
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Hello,
Those are really some nice tips & i am thankful that your ideas cleared some amount of mist around me.
I came here being referred by google webmaster central blog,and i am doing a research over the effects of content copying (ill effects and nil effects).
I want to make a query here.Will the listings of the unique contents of a site will be affected if it has duplicated posts being filtered away in google?
Linking back to original content works the best
Hi Vanessa,
I would just like to ask if ever I have an article unique content and all in place wants to submit it to different article sites would it cause duplicate issues?…I mean i wanted my information to be spread as easily and as fast as possible and also want to absorb as much traffic as possible…im not like trying to fool the engine just want to have a bigger possibility of online visibility…would that hurt the site that I am linking to?
Thanks…anyone can answer…:)
This is a great post and highlights many of the SEO thoughts I share with my clients.
When creating articles that I know will syndicate, I will generally provide a good summary for the syndication. Or if the article for my site is more popular among readers (or gets requests for syndication) I will re-write it with the same idea, just different way of saying it. This is the one I offer for syndication, complete with backlinks of course!
One thing bloggers want to consider… if you are using a blogging platform that you control (not one hosted on the free sites) you may be able to modify the code or add a plug in that would create a disclaimer right at the beginning of your posts or feeds. This would help to ensure that feed scraping would still give you credit and links back to your content!
Great post and great information!
I’ve always posted my content first and waited for the bots to crawl before submitting to other sites.
Some will not allow this as it’s been published already on the original site and that’s fine with me. I just delete them from my list.
Vanessae – This reminds me of a particulary stupid thing I use to do with duplicate content. I would use a blog for rough drafts of articles so that I could on them over time and get other’s input. Then, I’d put the final one up on my site leaving the blog version there. Net result: my site (which I really care about) was ranking behind my blog.
I think it was SES 2006 Miami when you explained (gently) to me that it was a little cockeyed.
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Vanessa,
Thanks for this article. Definitely provides me some good ideas–and lessens my worries about getting dinged for duplicate content in a way that will hurt my site.
About the links in the body of the articles, it sounds like a great idea (and I will begin to do this)–but a bit of a bother too.
Vanessa, I concur that this is a great post. I am curious to hear your feedback on posting videos to multiple sites. We have posted certain videos on several sharing sites (Youtube, Metacafe, etc) to give our products broader exposure. Do you know if Google or the others penalize a site for such “duplicate content?”
We upload the files in FLV or WMV format, and tag each upload with the same key words using http://www.tubemogul.com. Most of the sites we upload to don’t offer a permalink backtrack that I’ve been able to find.
I’ve not been able to find any commentary on this issue of “duplicate content” where video is the issue. Any thoughts will be appreciated.
Thanks.
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Thanks for the great article and also your comment Andy.. was referred here by one of Matt’s posts. Just started a cartoon blog recently and was really hacked off that my entire feed was being republished by a few guys within the first 10 days of the site being launched.
I include links back to my original posts in the articles I write and the cartoon thumbnail also links back to original post for the full version of the toon. Not sure how long these changes take to reflect in google but it’s been a month already and it seems the guys syndicating my content are still ranked higher and more frequently than I am
I have also tried writing to the syndicators as suggested above with no response.. any ideas as to what I should do or do I just need to be patient?
After reading this I don’t think I would ever want to syndicate my content. It doesn’t make sense to syndicate your content only have have a more authoritative site outrank you with your own content. Even if you have a link back to your site and the original source who says they will click on the link? I would rather just rank for the content myself and have the visitor originally on my site. This just makes much more sense to me.
Hello,
I’m author of software product and I’m interested about what will happened with the description of this product on my site? The same product description will be sent to thousands download-portals (Download.com, Simtel.Net, Softpedia…) via the PAD file.
Does this will affect my site? And how?
This is all very interesting. I started to utilize article marketing the last half of 2008 and do incorporate links. I do my best to adhere to the different guidelines such as no “promoting your website within your article.”
I usually take a blog post and re-post it with a few tweaks here and there. I guess I have more to learn about back links and SEO.
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