Syndicated Content “Duplicate”?

I was recently asked if syndicating or licensing content would have a negative impact on the author website’s rankings. Was syndicated content seen as duplicate content? My answer may be useful to others, so here it is in a nutshell:

Maliciously duplicated content (with the intent to deceive through redirects, multiple pages on the same domain, etc.) will have a negative effect, but syndicated/licensed content has been on Google’s radar for a while as an exception. The short answer is that they do a pretty good job of recognizing who published the content first and it isn’t likely there will be any penalty to your site for syndicating your articles. A longer answer is found in the Google post on duplicate content here http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359. They say :

Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing their version of the content.

The noindex meta tag on the syndicated version would be the ultimate way to ensure it didn’t get indexed and become problematic. I’m not sure of how many publishers will like that contractual provision, though.

I went on to mention the development strategy of www.theknot.com – they licensed content with Yahoo! and used that to establish themselves in the marketplace. It didn’t hurt them a bit… My advice to this particular person was to go for it (syndicating/licensing her content) just make sure you have a few contractual items in place to ensure proper “credit” is given to your site.

Written by jclayc on November 2nd, 2009 with 1 comment.
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