Tag Archives: content syndication

What is content syndication and how does it help you in content marketing?

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How content syndication helps content marketing
How content syndication helps content marketing

Content syndication can take place in two directions: you syndicate your content, or you publish syndicated content on your website or blog.

Syndication means when your content is republished by a third-party website. Content that can be syndicated includes blog posts, infographics, videos and articles.

Just as someone may be interested in publishing your content, you may also publish someone else’s content.

Many news websites use content syndication. For example, many newspapers syndicate content from Reuters and Associated Press. These are independent news gathering services. Newspapers and magazines pay them a fixed fee and based on the agreement, they get a certain number of news items or images that they can syndicate from the agencies.

Content syndication can also be a good content marketing tool.

What is the difference between guest blogging and content syndication?

You must be wondering, if your content is being published on another website or blog, how is it different from guest blogging? After all, in both the cases you should be getting backlinks or getting your content exposed to a different audience.

Guest blogging is when you write a blog post or an article, preferably exclusively, for another online publication. This blog post or article shouldn’t be published elsewhere, not even on your own blog or website.

Syndication on the other hand allows you to publish your content on multiple websites and blogs. In most of the cases, an API/RSS/XML connection is used to distribute the content.

If someone uses your RSS feed or an XML link to extract content from your website (based on your permission) and then publishes the content with due attribution, it is syndication. The content exists on your website. It also exists on other websites.

You can syndicate product reviews, movie reviews, authority blog posts, or even social media feeds. Syndication can be paid or free, depending on your agreement with the publishers.

Doesn’t content syndication create Google-related content duplication problem?

The basic idea behind content syndication is that your content appears on multiple websites. Doesn’t it create lots of duplicate content?

Yes it does?

Does Google penalize you for having duplicate content scattered all over the web?

Google says no.

But you need to take care that the websites and blogs publishing your content link back to your website or blog with attribution. You should also advise them to use the canonical link (that tells Google that the original content belongs to your URL).

Most of the content syndication tools automatically insert link to the original website. Content syndication is supposed to be automatic anyway. For example, if someone uses your RSS feed to extract content, whatever script is used to extract content also extracts the original URL and then links back to it.

The benefits of content syndication

There are many. You can promote your best performing content on bigger websites if they are ready to syndicate your content because of its quality and relevance.

Your old content, if it is still relevant and useful, can be repurposed and syndicated.

You generate backlinks automatically sometimes, which in turn benefits your SEO.

You can also use professional content syndication platforms such as Taboola and Outbrain to spread your content on other websites and blogs.

How to find content syndication partners

You can search on Google. You may use the following phrases when searching Google:

    • “published from”

    • “originally published in”

    • “original source credited to”

    • “republished with permission from”

You can also combine these phrases with the niche you’re looking for. For example, you can search for [“originally published in” “content writing tips”]

I have used [] just to club the two phrases together, you don’t need to use these brackets. The above combination should bring up websites that have published on the topics of content writing tips and somewhere they also contain the phrase “originally published in”, which indicates that they may have syndicated the content from somewhere else.

Do’s and don’ts of republishing your content on Medium and LinkedIn

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dos-and-donts-of-republishing-content-on-Medium-and-LinkedIn

Here is a nice online forum thread on the do’s and don’ts of republishing your content on Medium and LinkedIn.

A long time back I had written a blog post on whether you should use the Medium blog publishing platform for content marketing and publishing your content.

As long as you stick to the basic tenets of content quality, I think on the web, when it comes to creating sources for inbound traffic, the more is the proverbial merrier.

Although there are pros and cons for using your own as well as external publishing platforms, every platform and content channel has its own advantages.

The biggest benefit of publishing on websites like Medium and LinkedIn is that they already have a ready-made audience. Even your first blog post over there can go viral. These websites already enjoy better search engine rankings.

With limited budget it is not possible to publish unique content on every major platform, including your own blog and website. This is why, sometimes you have to republish your content – what you have published on your own blog you also publish on Medium and LinkedIn. This is called content republishing.

But then what about the duplicate content penalty?

Google doesn’t like crawling, indexing and ranking the same content again and again. This is why, it’s algorithm frowns upon duplicate content.

So, if the same blog post exists on your own blog, on Medium and also on LinkedIn, it can end up annoying the Google algorithm.

As mentioned by Rand Fishkin in the above thread, even if Google doesn’t penalize you for publishing duplicate content, your traffic may get diluted because instead of ranking your link higher, Google may end up ranking the Medium or the LinkedIn link higher. All the traffic due to your high-quality content will be lapped up by these publishing platforms.

The benefit would be that may be your link never had a chance anyway, so your content wouldn’t have gotten so much attention if it hadn’t been published on Medium and LinkedIn. A valid point.

What would you prefer? 3000 views on Medium or 30 views on your own blog? Decide on your own.

These days I am republishing my content on Medium. How do I do it? Why do I do it?

How do I do it without running the risk of getting into the “duplicate content” penalty?

I use the canonical tag in the original blog post.

Insert image of the canonical link

When you use the canonical tag within your web page or blog post you tell Google that the link containing this canonical tag is the original link, the original source of the content and wherever else the same content appears, it shouldn’t be considered for search engine rankings.

It’s a good practice that whenever you republish, in the end, link to the original content and specify it that the original content exists somewhere else.

These days I am republishing some of my blog posts on Medium for the reason mentioned above. The exposure that I may get on Medium can be exponential.

I don’t hope to get business from Medium although, it cannot be totally ruled out. My main attraction is the newsletter signup form that I include with every post. If one of my posts begins to get lots of traffic many visitors are bound to subscribe to my email updates. This is what I’m targeting for by republishing my content on Medium.