A Guide to an Effective Content Syndication and SEO Strategy 

Content syndication, at its core, involves republishing content on other platforms to maximize reach. These two keywords—republishing and content—raise valid concerns, especially within the content marketing field. 

What impact does content syndication have on your SEO? Does it help or hurt your ability to drive organic search traffic? And how do you avoid getting penalized for posting duplicate content? You may already know that Google generally frowns upon duplication, but you might not have a comprehensive grasp of the various factors and nuances at play in this context.

Over the years, many marketers have shared concerns about duplicated content, SEO cannibalization, lowered rankings, and even plagiarism. On a brighter note, adhering to content syndication best practices will minimize any potential SEO risks. When you weigh the SEO benefits you can gain from content syndication, the advantages often outweigh these risks.  

Truth is, content syndication yields a lot of SEO benefits. As you continue to leverage content syndication as a lead gen strategy over time, your efforts will sharpen, resulting in higher rankings in organic keyword searches. With the right and strategic syndication approach, duplicate content penalties should not be a concern anymore. 

In this article, we’ll explore the SEO aspect of content syndication, and how it organically boosts ranking and visibility while debunking misconceptions surrounding both SEO and content syndication. Additionally, we’ll introduce advanced SEO strategies relevant to 2024, such as AI-driven search algorithms and Google’s E-A-T principles, to ensure your content syndication efforts are as effective as possible. 

Avoid an SEO pitfall 

Let’s look at the potential challenges involved with publishing content to third-party platforms. You’ll want to keep these factors in mind as you plan your next syndication campaign, as these will help you avoid running into SEO-related snags.  

Will syndicated content hurt SEO? 

Does content syndication harm SEO efforts? The word ‘syndication’ is often associated with different types of content duplication, but this is not entirely accurate. 

Duplicate content arises when identical or closely resembling content appears on several pages within a single website or across different websites.  

Many individuals associate duplicate content with sections of text that are replicated from one page to another or from one site to another, and this is indeed the most apparent form.  

However, it is important to note that it doesn’t need to be an exact copy for search engines to determine that the content is overly similar. Furthermore, “content” encompasses more than just the text visible on the page; metadata, including title tags and meta descriptions, can also be classified as duplicate content. 

When Google determines which results to show to users, its goal is to offer a diverse yet pertinent selection of information. However, identical content from various or even the same URLs does not add any extra value for the user. Therefore, search engines have developed a method to identify and eliminate URLs that feature the same or highly similar content. 

Google employs a predictive strategy that involves analyzing URL patterns. With advanced analytics, similarities among URLs are now being evaluated. This allows Google to determine which pages are likely hosting duplicate content. 

When Google detects that duplicate content is being published with the intention of manipulating traffic and rankings, the algorithm modifies the indexing and ranking of the affected sites. Your site’s ranking could decline. Multiple website pages can even be completely excluded from the Google index, meaning they will no longer be visible in search results. In the case of duplicate content, what search engines will do is identify the most credible page of the bunch and rank that one instead.  

Google’s penalty for duplicate content starts with having multiple URLs showing the same content. 

However, modern algorithms, particularly those driven by AI, like Google’s RankBrain and BERT, focus on understanding the context and intent behind the content. This means that while avoiding duplicate content is essential, ensuring your syndicated content is contextually relevant and provides unique value is just as critical. 

But how is it possible for search engines to gauge the credibility of one website (with the same content pieces) over another? Here are a few factors they take into consideration:  

• Search intent: Search engines can detect the intent behind a user’s search query by comparing it to other similar searches archived across the web.   

• Web page relevance: Search engines use keywords, meta tags, and other critical metadata to detect which web pages appear most relevant.   

• Content quality: Search engines assess web pages’ expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) on any given topic. In 2024, Google’s E-A-T principles are more important than ever. Your syndicated content should demonstrate deep expertise, come from an authoritative source, and be trustworthy to rank well.  

• User experience: Search engines prioritize web pages that offer more user-friendly experiences. In particular, Core Web Vitals—focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability—are critical components of user experience that directly impact SEO rankings. 

How to avoid search engine flags when syndicating content? 

In content syndication, there exists a shared agreement among publishers, and explicit consent is given for the republishing of the original content or article—whether through a formal media partnership or in a more casual arrangement. 

To avoid getting flagged for duplicate content, you want to make it crystal clear to search engines that your syndicated content is not only credible but also shared with intention.  

And you can do that by following these three tips:  

• Publish content to your site first before syndicating  

This is content syndication 101—you can typically syndicate content that’s already been published on your own site. It’s a simple way of communicating to search engines that yours is the original piece.   

• Include backlinks

Whenever you syndicate content to outside channels, make sure to include links back to the original piece on your site. It’s a signal that lets search engines know your page contains the original asset. To make it even more obvious, add anchor text to your hyperlinks that say, “Originally published on yourwebsite.com.”  

• Use canonical tags  

Here’s where it gets a little technical. Canonical tags are page-level meta tags you can include within the HTML header of a web page. They provide clear signals to search engines that a specific URL contains an original piece of content. And since search engines prefer to rank pages containing original content, it’s a good idea to include them in your HTML coding.   

Let’s say you publish a blog on your site, which you plan to syndicate to outside channels. You’ll want to use a canonical tag in the URL of the original page so search engines know it’s the preferred source of content. Using DemandScience as an example, here’s what that looks like:  

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://demandscience.com/resources/blog/create-content-for-syndication” />  

Also, it’s important to note that canonical tags are only viewable to search engines, so web page visitors won’t be affected.   

But my partner websites refuse to use canonical tags for syndicated content

The primary motivation for a website to refrain from designating an article as canonical is to attempt to manipulate the system—they aim to capture SEO advantages that the original published URL gets. While they often do, these advantages are often short-lived.  

Google’s algorithms for detecting duplicate content are becoming more advanced, and eventually, crawlers will typically impose a ‘forced’ canonical tag on duplicated or unmarked syndicated URLs. This process is not without its flaws, and it is not uncommon for a syndicated piece to be indexed first, outranking the original content. In this situation, you can consider these syndicated links without canon tags as mere standard republished content pieces. 

The SEO benefits of content syndication 

You can look at the aforementioned risks as technical pitfalls that can be avoided. While the SEO advantages content syndication brings in are undeniably hard to pass on. Enhanced overall visibility is clearly the flagship benefit, but having a strategic content distribution campaign through a network of respected publications can significantly increase readership, website traffic, and link equity or domain authority. 

While content syndication can improve your SEO performance, remember that results don’t happen overnight. It can take some time to see the positive impact of your campaign efforts. But little by little, you’ll find small incremental improvements not only help boost your SEO rankings; they also help you measure and improve the quality of your content, which is a major factor in carrying out a successful syndication campaign.   

Here are a few examples of how strategic content syndication can increase your SEO value gradually over time:  

Improved backlink authority 

A huge benefit of content syndication is the ability to expand brand awareness and visibility to larger audiences, and backlinking is a critical part of the process.   

A backlink is a one-way link found on one website that directs web traffic to another website through an anchor text. Backlinks act as individual “votes” that let search engines know: “Hey, this is important content.” The more backlinks your content generates, the higher it will rank in searches.   

Not only that, but backlinks also determine the strength of your content from a relevancy standpoint. This measurement, known as backlink authority, factors into your organic search performance. When search engines notice an increase in backlinks to your site from other reputable publishers, it’s a signal that your site is a relevant, trusted source of information. As a result, your content will rank higher than other brands with less backlink authority.   

Increased referral traffic  

Let’s say another company publishes a piece of content on their website, and that piece of content contains a backlink to a blog on your website. When people click on that backlink, they get redirected to your page. And that’s what’s known as referral traffic. The more referral traffic you can drive from these backlinks to your website, the more chances you have to connect with potential buyers looking for a possible solution to their business concerns. So, if you think about it, referral traffic is simply a measurement of how impactful your content is in drawing prospects to your webpage.  

But referral traffic also helps boost other key performance metrics, like time spent on site and average session duration. If you find a significant number of referred visitors not only click through to your page, but also spend additional time navigating the site itself, it’s a tell-tale sign you’ve got an engaged group of prospects, who could convert to customers later in the sales journey.   

Search engines will quickly pick up on the increased volume of referral traffic to your webpage, validating it as a credible source of information. As a result, your page will perform better in search engine rankings.   

Increased organic traffic 

Unlike referral traffic, which finds its way to your site via backlink navigation, organic web traffic results from people finding your page through organic, unpaid search engine queries. As you continue to improve your content syndication efforts, driving more positive ROI with each iteration, you’ll simultaneously reap the benefits of increased organic traffic as well. And that’s for two good reasons:  

• Improved backlink authority  

The stronger you can build backlink authority via content syndication, the stronger your content will perform in search rankings overall, which leads to increased organic traffic.  

• Expanded brand awareness  

Building greater brand awareness through content syndication makes your content more discoverable across the web, allowing you to drive higher click-through rates among targeted audiences. Search engines see this as a sign of confidence in your content, and therefore, rank it higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).   

As you continue to leverage content syndication, you might also notice an uptick in organic traffic from branded searches. This is when a person includes the name of your brand or business (or a variation of the two) in a keyword search. An increase in branded search volume is a good sign that you’ve increased brand recognition and top-of-mind awareness among larger audiences, which also leads to a significant jump in organic traffic.   

Strategically syndicate content with confidence 

With the right and strategic syndication approach, duplicate content penalties should not be a concern anymore.  

At DemandScience, content syndication has been ingeniously working for our client partners. Powered by our robust data ecosystem, what might otherwise be mere republishing of content becomes strategic repurposing of content as lead magnets.  

Using our intent engine, we can identify companies and buyers already showing interest across various topics. This enables us to serve the right content, to the right buyers, at the right time, helping to generate the highest quality leads possible. 

Our multi-channel content syndication solution taps across all digital platforms, ensuring your repurposed and tailored content lands in front of relevant audiences without the SEO penalty cloud hanging over your head. 

By leveraging our sophisticated targeting capabilities, combined with detailed reporting and insights, DemandScience enables you to continuously refine your strategy, ensuring long-term success in both lead generation and SEO performance. 

Learn more about our multi-channel syndication approach. Get in touch with our experts.