Comments on: SBS Mailbag: Is Syndicating Content Good or Bad?

By: Gennady

Gennady — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:38:11 +0000

The search engine reps will provide the standard answer:

- Make sure you provide a good experience to your users with content that is not duplicated.

By: Matt McGee

Matt McGee — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 04:52:06 +0000

James – that’s a great question, and I don’t have any direct experience with clients who produced anything similar. It’s more complicated, I think, than the original question raised in this post.

Assuming that what you’re doing is part of your design template, my gut feeling is that, over time, search engines would eventually start to ignore all that syndicated content. It may do them no good to credit the outbound links from you, and no good to credit you for so-called fresh content.

But I could be way off. That question should be brought to SMX Advanced and asked of the search engine reps.

By: James

James — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:50:03 +0000

@Gennady – lol! No, not Mahalo. lol – it’s actually a crime stats site with zero ads at all. Just a hobby – but I like to find local news stories via RSS to display the latest crime stories in the last 24 hours in some of these cities…so I don’t know if there is really any seo benefit to it except for the ‘fresh’ content? I just didn’t want to hurt the local news sites that I’m syndicating – and I didn’t want to hurt my own site.

By: Gennady

Gennady — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:15:26 +0000

James – sounds like you are running Mahalo!

I’d would not advise that method for your own SEO rankings, but then you have Mahalo.com that is making a serious business out of doing just that.

By: James

James — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:15:40 +0000

I loved the answer you gave – it made a lot of sense from the writer/author perspective.

I have a question from the other side of the fence I think.

If I am publishing 10 or 15 different syndicated snippets onto a single page, where the title is linked to the original article and the snippet is essentially the first few sentences, am I hurting the author’s original work and am I hurting my own ability to rank because of duplicate content filters?

Let’s say I have 3 or 4 unique paragraphs, a few pictures, then 10 or 15 syndicated snippets under that unique content.

Lol, Does that make sense? Do I get penalized as the site owner…but more importantly, am I hurting the author in any way by syndicating content like that?

Thanks!

By: Gennady

Gennady — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:10:49 +0000

That was a very good answer actually. As a rule of thumb, you want that site to link back to you making that link the main indicator of who the original author is…in theory. However, I have seen this work in the opposite way. I have even seen sites with less authority start ranking for content that they syndicate from a site with more authority.

The main question is are the articles she is writing specifically targeted to ranking for keywords? If not, syndicate away with no harm. If you are trying to rank your content for certain terms, I would MAKE SURE that I start seeing results for those keywords before I syndicate to any site, much less one with greater authority.

In the end, there are no rules set in stone as they are not always followed (even by the engines). I think engines will always try to deliver a result that is useful for the user and if that involves crediting a syndicating site with more authority (possibly a signal that it may contain other content the user might find useful), then that is what they will do.