Syndication Best Practices: Reduce the Risk of Being Outranked for Your Own Content

by Adam Sherk on June 30, 2009

Syndicating content is an important business development initiative for publishers; it generates revenue, increases exposure, drives traffic and helps facilitate inbound links. However from an SEO perspective there is a downside, as syndication creates duplicate content issues. Search engines don’t want to show users multiple versions of the same content, so when an article has been syndicated it’s likely that one version will be given prominence – and that may or may not be the original.

One of the most common concerns I hear from publishers is the fact that syndication partners are outranking them for their own content. This is a fairly common occurrence, especially when the partners are strong, authoritative domains and their syndicated versions attract a lot of links. To some extent publishers have to accept that they can’t have their cake and eat it too – if you’re going to license your content to other sites, there is always a chance that those sites might outrank you for that content.

The only way to completely eliminate the issue is to require syndication partners to block their versions from the engines. Partners typically refuse such an arrangement, but it’s becoming a more common request in contract negotiations.

Beyond that, there are steps that publishers can take to help reduce the risk of being outranked for their own content:

Require partners to link back to the original on every syndicated article, for example: This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link, ideally with the headline as the link text]. It is important for the link to point directly to the original URL
Publish the content on your site and allow it to be indexed prior to releasing it to partners
Limit the amount of the text that is syndicated – instead of giving partners the full content, allow them to publish a reduced snippet of the article
Require partners to use generic title tags (e.g. their site name) on their versions

In its tips for dealing with duplicate content, Google specifically refers to the attribution link but with a caveat:

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we’ll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.

You can see that the attribution link is recommended, but it is not guaranteed to resolve the issue. So it is important to build in as many protective steps as possible into any syndication contract.

UPDATE:
In December 2009 Google began supporting the rel=”canonical” tag across different domains, giving publishers another tool to use in mitigating duplicate content issues caused by syndication. Check out Will Publishers Add Cross-Domain Rel=Canonical to Syndication Deals? for more information.

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The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites: October 8, 2009 at 1:32 pm

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Rahul July 16, 2009 at 6:53 am: Hi Adam,

Great post ! From a publisher perspective if we give a live link (do follow) to all articles/news websites.Then don’t you think we will pass our own link juice (Value) to those websites. Giving away 1/2 links is ok, but when you are syndicating content through out year, you will end up with thousands of out bound links (one way )!! Don’t you think it will de-stabilize the whole website architecture in google and then you may loose everything things!!

** assuming use of no follow is out of question.As google strictly say – you must have to give a do follow link if you are syndicating content from other website. ***

Content Syndication is like a double edge sword. It is going to hurt you from either side. What you say?

Regards
Rahul
Adam Sherk July 16, 2009 at 9:37 am: Thanks for your comment Rahul. I agree that there are SEO implications that both content creators and syndicators need to consider. But since syndication is an important source of revenue for many publishers, and there will always be sites looking to add good content that they may not be capable of creating themselves, I expect it will continue to be a common practice. So it’s important for both parties to be aware of the SEO implications and to try to mitigate any negatives as best they can.
Alex Kahl August 28, 2009 at 8:23 pm: Hello Adam,

Thanks for the advice about duplicate content. I agree that attribution links are vital, and I recommend not posting all the content

Do you have any information on how to tell when an article is considered duplicate? In other words how different does text have to be to be considered different?

The good folks at google state “Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.”

What if 5 out of 500 words are different? 5 out of 50? Is being “appreciably similar” defined by some mathematical formula – say for example “the percentage of words that are the same in a given text exceeds 75%?”

On a related note, if an article or press release is supposed to be posted on several locations, what’s are some rules of thumb for rewriting the text in such a way to avoid it from being considered duplicate content?
Adam Sherk August 31, 2009 at 10:41 am: Good questions Alex.

The engines avoid providing percentages or specific formulas for what constitutes duplicate content. This is in their best interest, as revealing that information would make it harder to prevent abuses.

I think a good rule of thumb is, ‘Would users consider these two pages to be essentially the same article?’ If so, there’s a good chance that the engines will too.

In terms of rewriting or reworking content, a good approach is to summarize key points and/or quote select passages and then add your own take or spin to it. In this way you are adding value for users, which in turn makes the content more valuable and less likely to be filtered as duplicate.