At GrowTraffic, we pride ourselves on being leaders within the SEO industry, especially when it comes to content. We often get asked questions about content; how to optimise it, the importance of it and what types are best. Recently, we have been asked a lot of questions revolving around syndicating, specifically whether or not content syndication is bad for SEO. This blog aims to delve into content syndication a little more in the hope of answering the frequently asked question – does syndicating your content help or hurt your SEO?
What Is Content Syndication?
Even if the content that you produce is well written and well optimised, if it isn’t gaining traffic, it isn’t doing its job!
In a nutshell, content syndication refers to the process of republishing the same piece of content on a number of different websites. Syndicating your content allows you to broaden your audience, introducing your content to new readers. Many marketers worry that publishing their content elsewhere may mean that they miss out on traffic visiting their own site – it’s important when republishing your content that you include links back to the original piece, please your SEO strategies, your audience and of course Google!
Although this type of republishing isn’t a new concept, it can often get mixed up with other styles of republishing content.
Guest posting – writing new, original content for a third party blog
Content repurposing – changing existing content to fit a third party’s platform.
Unlike these two concepts, content syndication is reposting the exact copy of the original content.
Does Content Syndication Help or Hurt SEO?
Syndicating content in its definition sounds rather similar to duplicate content – something that Google most definitely does not like.
It’s important you establish a difference between syndicated content and duplicate content so that it doesn’t harm your SEO and affect your Google rankings. You can do this by inserting a link back to the original piece of content.
If done properly, syndicated content can benefit your SEO – driving referral traffic back to your site where the original content was published.
Syndicating content can help your SEO by:
- Boosting brand awareness
- Gaining backlinks
- Leading to further sales
This being said, there are many things to be aware of when syndicating content – ways in which it could in fact harm your SEO.
- It could be regarded as spam
- It could outrank the original content
- It could affect organic search rankings
How To Syndicate Content The Right Way
It’s important when syndicating content that you go about it the right way in order to avoid the possibility of it harming your SEO strategies.
The most crucial part about syndicating content is to ensure that it is already indexed before you start approaching other websites to republish your content. You need to ensure you get there first! This is important so that Google doesn’t think you are the one copying content.
It’s important that you pitch your content to high quality websites that are relevant to your niche.
Content syndication is more than just republishing content, it is also important for developing strong relationships within your industry, further pitching you as a leader in your niche. Building connections online is not only brilliant for your SEO but also for strengthening engagement within your field.
Conclusion
Content syndication, if done properly can help your SEO, however, with that being said, it is a slippery slope to the practice, in fact, becoming harmful to your ever important strategies.
If you would like to discuss content syndication with the experts, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with a member of our team.
You can call us today on 0161 706 0012 or drop a line at info@growtraffic.co.uk.
