Yahoo News Syndication: Attribution Links Not SEO-Friendly

In my post on syndication best practices I noted that one way to reduce the likelihood that partners will outrank you for own content is to require a link back to your original on every syndicated article, for example:

This article originally appeared on Example.com: [direct link to original article, ideally with the headline as the link text]

The use of attribution links is recommended by the engines themselves, although they caution publishers that the links are used as a signal but do not guarantee that the original versions will be given prominence for related search queries.

In looking at syndicated content on Yahoo News, most of the syndicated articles do not include attribution links (each news source likely has to request or provide them), but among those that do exist there is a problem. The Yahoo attribution links do not point directly to the original article URLs. Instead they point to an internal Yahoo News URL which then has a temporary 302 redirect to the original article.

For example at the bottom of this syndicated LiveScience.com article you’ll see the attribution link:

However the link points to:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/livescience/sc_livescience/storytext/amazonriverdatedto11millionyearsold/32639997/SIG=121l8b9em/*http://www.livescience.com/environment/090708-amazon-river.html

That URL then has a 302 redirect to the original LiveScience.com URL. Yahoo is probably using the temporary redirects for tracking, but this practice is interfering with the SEO value of the links. So if you are negotiating a syndication agreement with Yahoo News, be sure to request attribution links directly to your original URLs, or at least require Yahoo to use permanent 301 redirects.

Going back to the LiveScience.com example, a search today in Google using the exact headline “Amazon River Dated to 11 Million Years Old” brings up these top results:

Google results comparing Yahoo News and LiveScience.com

Another site becomes the de facto #1 through an embedded Google News result, followed by the Yahoo News syndicated article and then the LiveScience.com original.

The good news for LiveScience.com is that Google is showing both results instead of filtering out their page in favor of the Yahoo version on a stronger domain. However the split result is certainly costing them clicks.

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