Creating content is no small feat – especially when you consider how much time is spent factoring in your goals, your resources, and using them to develop your business’ content strategy.
Now, when you think about creating content for multiple sites or channels, the time that you could spend focusing on content grows exponentially. With this in mind, brands and small businesses have looked to content syndication in an effort to get their content in front of as many eyes as possible.
What is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is re-posting your content across different sites or channels to reach a wider audience. Through this method, you are leveraging content that has already been created to gain more exposure for your brand or business.
In years’ passed, brands and small businesses have used this method as an easier way to get their content seen by as many people as possible. It would save time in having to create new content and could drive the content creator to be seen as more of an authority in the topic or field that their blog was centered around.
However, in 2011, Google released Panda, a major update to its search algorithm, which altered various SEO strategies across the board. One of which is content – both in quality and value as pertaining to search.
Major areas of focus for Panda were:
- Originality, and re-assessing whether or not if the content provides any original information or data.
- Where, in terms of value, do certain page’s content lie and where they stand when measured up against other searched pages/content that are similar.
Post-Panda, a lot of syndicated content was affected, as it was then considered to be duplicate content. Currently, when the same piece of content – for instance, a blog – is posted across multiple websites, Google is unsure of proper attribution, so the values of each posted blog suffer.
Is Content Syndication Right for Me?
Well, the answer isn’t so cut and dry. Content syndication is a viable strategy; however, it has its place. It has the potential to help or harm depending on what your strategy happens to be and how content syndication is incorporated into it.
If your strategy relies on using a larger platform like Medium, LinkedIn or Facebook, you can take advantage of certain features these sites offer to get the most out of your content.
Take advantage of Medium’s import feature to get a ‘rel=canonical’ tag added to your content. What will adding a ‘rel=canonical’ tag do? Adding a ‘rel=canonical’ tag to the page’s source code makes sure that when Google sees your content, it knows where to give proper attribution. A lot of larger websites don’t give you the control needed to do this; thankfully, Medium is one of them.
If you want to make the most of LinkedIn or Facebook for content syndication, publishing articles on these platforms is also a good way to get your content seen, as Google doesn’t penalize content written on social media sites.
However, if your content syndication doesn’t involve, or revolve around, any of these platforms, what are your options? Well, a good place to start is to create content from the ground up that is tailored to the desired site or channel’s audience. This is a more focused approach to getting your content in multiple places. Instead of focusing on getting your content on a lot of different sites, spend your time and energy on a select few and create content for those.
