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Duplicate Content Vs. Syndication
May 27, 2008 By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
Should you syndicate your site’s web content? If you were to start a new business you might not have a brand name that consumers and web searchers recognize. Even if you’ve been out in the market for years, maybe your local search market recognizes you, but a larger audience would not. In this post, I want to show you a quick example of duplicated content, how it’s not necessarily penalized, and why it can be a smart move to syndicate your content.
Head to an engine like Google and type in “International SEO“, I know, you are probably tired of this search, but watch this…
One page that is listed in the first page of a Google search, is this one:
searchengineland.com/080422-132417.php (Number 9 as of 5/22/08, number 6 in ranking as of 5/27/08).
If you strip away all of the Search Engine Land navigation, advertising, and social media widgets, what is left? What is 90% of the page’s actual information comprised of? An image and a text blurb about the image. This image actually. Or is it this image?
This SEL post is a guest spot by the SEO firm Elliance.com. Let me say up front that I love Elliance’s Infographics series! I really like how they have things boiled down to an understandable chunk of information. Even so… Go back to Google and click several pages deep and look for Elliance related listings. If you are using WebPosition 3 or 4 Pro, try this mission. You’ll find that elliance.com is listed in Google but as of today they have rankings in 62 and 78 respectively for International SEO on these two pages:
http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-services/international-search.aspx
http://searchengineoptimization.elliance.com/search-marketing-resources/seo-infographics.aspx?title=International-SEO-Tips
Something to learn here… Not all online marketing is about optimizing your site or getting your site to the top ranking. Some times there are others sites that -can- and will rank for highly competitive phrases, and it might be better to have those sites rank with your info while you work on your own rankings. By doing this, you may be able to get a new audience to learn about your site or services.
Where it not for Search Engine Land and that fact that Elliance’s content is regularly syndicated there, I may never have heard of Elliance. Additionally, Elliance may not have gotten exposure and links from this blog but also from many other blogs and SEO news sites that enjoy the infographics series at SEL and Elliance’s site.
If archive.org is any indicator, Elliance has been around for quite some time… but in a world full of marketing firms online and offline, you can’t really know them all. Even interesting and helpful sites like Elliance some times get lost in the shuffle of amazing to mediocre sites but syndication with the right sites can be helpful.
Duplicate Content Vs. Syndication Continued
By Webposition SEO Team
By Scott Goodyear
A bit more on the duplicate content vs. syndication idea…
I found a recent post on the popular Wolf Howl SEO blog where he gives his own take on how Google may be getting their duplicate content filters wrong. Wrong or right, he has a point. Not all original content creators will rank highly for their own content.
Search engines can place great value in domain authority and other factors. This means that a site that originally published some piece of content may not rank as well as another site that republishes that same content. This is true even if that same content is re-published quite some time later. While this could all change tomorrow, I’ll give you a pretty straight forward example from our own MarketPosition site…
A local SEO shop called Anvil Media allows us to repost their articles from time to time. Perform a search on the phrase: Building Trust Online to Build Sales. As of today, you’ll find a page from Market Position ranking in first place for that phrase. With Kent’s permission we re-posted the Building Trust Online to Build Sales article in August 2006.
In the same search results you will find a link to a post at SEMpdx where Kent re-published this article in April 2007. (SEMpdx is Kent Lewis’ Portland Oregon SEO community site.)
Looking back through the Internet Archive, this article was originally on Anvil Media’s site around April 2006. It is possible that Kent may have even published this piece elsewhere or previous to this, on a different Anvil Media URL.
Putting this a different way… Google does not necessarily rank the original publisher in the top spot:
While I’ve read a few theories including those that Google -can- use the original date of publication as one factor in determining whether a page is actually duplicate or not, and then filter out the duplicates (this way the dupes may not rank as highly as the original publication…) obviously this doesn’t always happen. But these are good ideas and theories on how Google works in relation to duplicate pages, and may generally apply as one of several overall factors that they balance when making an algorithmic decision in how to rank original and duplicate pages.
Syndication can be a good thing if you are able to get your content
onto a site that is popular, that has some trust, age, etc. On the other hand, this also means that for an indeterminate amount of time those other sites may out rank your pages for your content. It is a mixed blessing to be sure.