17 Mrz Content syndication – using content multiple times
Especially those responsible for content marketing are regularly faced with the challenge of publishing new content and generating traffic for their own website in order to ultimately ensure the competitiveness of the company. A cost-effective and time-efficient way to achieve all this is content syndication. What it is, what forms it takes and what needs to be considered with regard to SEO is discussed in the following article.
What is content syndication?
Simply put, content syndication is the multiple use or exchange of different media content. This can involve content in text form, such as articles, blog posts and studies, but also infographics, videos or podcasts. The corresponding content is first published on the company’s own website and later made available on other sites. There, the respective content then receives the addition „Originally appeared on…“.
Companies use content syndication as part of their content strategy. By publishing their own content on other sites, they can reach new audiences and increase their reach. Ideally, traffic to one’s own site is increased. In return, the publishing site gets high-quality content at a low cost and, above all, in a time-saving manner.
If you are interested in syndicating your content and finding partners for it, content optimization should be the main focus. High-quality content, especially infographics and tables or similar, are welcome for this purpose. In addition, one could think about setting up a separate subpage on which the syndication of content is explicitly allowed. Here, the respective conditions should also be listed. For example, the link handling must be clarified in advance, i.e. whether the publishing page may link to the company’s own website.
Free and paid syndication of content
There are various options for syndicating content, which can be both free and paid:
On the free side, you can publish your own articles, especially new and successful ones, for example, on larger websites that usually have better Domain Authority. The Domain Authority describes how significant a website is for the respective subject area and how likely it is to achieve good rankings. The newly acquired visibility is the decisive advantage here. Older content can be published, for example, on pages with similar Domain Authority and also similar target groups. This is particularly useful for niche topics, as reciprocal linking can lead to even greater relevance in the industry. Guest articles are also excellent for content syndication. The articles produced especially for other websites can later appear on your own site as syndicated content.
With the paid option, you pay to be able to publish your own content on portals or larger websites. Initially, this option was mainly used by large companies. The content is then displayed to users as recommended articles. It should be noted, however, that Google treats these articles like sponsored content and no SEO benefits can be hoped for in this case.
Content Syndication & SEO: Avoid Duplicate Content
Last but not least, content syndication can also be used as an SEO measure. By publishing on other pages with a possibly higher domain authority and linking to each other, the own rank authority can be improved. Content syndication therefore has positive effects on the ranking of one’s own page.
In principle, Google allows the syndication of content, but it must be clearly recognizable as such. If the content is not marked accordingly, Google will interpret it as duplicate content and punish it accordingly. Duplicate content is identical content that appears on different pages. This is then either filtered out or even negatively evaluated by Google. In any case, traffic and page ranking suffer.
However, there are ways to implement content syndication correctly and thus avoid the duplicate content problem:
One of them is the so-called canonical URL. This can be used to identify the original resource of a content. In the <head> area of the publishing page, the URL of the original article must be referenced with the HTML code rel=“canonical“. This way, Google recognizes the original author and does not evaluate the content as duplicate content. Any link power is also inherited to the original author’s page.
Another option is to include the NOINDEX meta-statement in the HTML source code. This way Google will not rank this page and the duplicate content problem is also solved. Also in this case the link power is inherited.
A third possibility arises by adding a DoFollow text link at the end of the post, which links to the original article. This way, the Google bots can recognize the content as syndicated content and do not interpret it as duplicate content. Link power is also inherited with this third option.
Conclusion
High-quality content provides increased credibility for companies and is perceived as particularly authentic. This is precisely why regular qualitative output is particularly important. Through content syndication, companies can gain access to it cost-effectively and time-efficiently, or achieve increased reach for their own content. Taking into account the duplicate content problem, content syndication thus offers considerable potential for a company’s content strategy.