The Best Practices for Content Syndication in the form of blogs, videos, or any other digital content on third party websites in exchange for exposure and backlinks to our website is called content syndication.
We could term this as a barter exchange. The 3rd-party website gets relevant, free content published on their website while we are able to reach their audience.
Content syndication gets your content in front of an audience, which, otherwise, would not have known about its existence.
With lesser investment and efforts, you are able to increase the reach and web presence of your brand. Some of the numerous benefits of content syndication are as follows:
- Improving your link authority.
- Targeted lead-generation opportunities.
- Recognition for your brand and mentions.
- Increased social media presence.
- Reaching a wider audience with lesser efforts.
Syndication gives your content an extra boost to support your existing marketing efforts. Along with your followers, you are able to put forth your content in front of the third-party audience.
Content syndication, when done right, can provide you with enormous benefits, whether it be you syndicating your content on another website or publishing syndicated content on your website.
Here are a few of the best practices that you should follow in both situations:
The main aim of syndication is to make your content reach a wider audience. For this, it is imperative to select syndication partners who have a much wider fan following than you.
Another thing to check is that the domain authority of the website where you are syndicating your content should always be higher than your website’s.
This way, you are able to get an inbound link from a website with higher domain authority. A backlink is a sort of “vote of confidence.” Thus receiving a backlink from an authoritative site increases the value of your page.
It is necessary to identify and set in place your target audience and select the syndication partners accordingly.
For a sports magazine, it will not make sense syndicating their content on a website based on food. In such cases, syndicating the content will not yield any fruitful results.
Thus, it is crucial to select those websites as your syndication partners that are relevant to your target audience.
Selecting such partners will not just drive traffic to your website, but also improve your chances of conversion.
While syndicating content, it is a good practice to post a part of your content and then link the article/page back to your original page on your website.
Posts with longer and more detailed content are going to be ranked higher in search results.
So posting a part of your content and not the entire post/blog improves the possibility (to some extent) of having a steady higher ranking over the websites where you have submitted your content.
Even though you republish your content, search engines should recognize your content as the original one.
For this, it is mandatory to have the third-party website give proper attribution to your website for your content.
This should be done to not face the consequences of having your content considered as a duplicate content.
Adding the “rel=canonical” tag to your syndicated post links Google to the original source of the content.
With this tag, you are not just recognized as the original content source, but also benefit from the links that the syndicated content attracts.
Although there is no harm in syndicating your content immediately after posting, it would be a good practice to keep some time gap between publishing your content and syndicating it.
The time gap ensures that your original content gets enough time to gain traction on its own. Syndication after a certain time period will give your original posts some boost in gaining popularity, traffic, and rankings.
Best Practices for Content Syndication: Hosting Syndicated Content
It is imperative to mention the original source i.e. give proper attribution to the original content creator if you are hosting syndicated content.
Duplicate content can harm your website’s rankings.
Mentioning the source of original content on your syndicated page ensures that it won’t be categorized as duplicate content and keeping your website’s ranking unhampered.
If you want to maintain your brand name as a content creator, it is important to keep syndicated content on your website lesser than your original content at all times.
Ideally, you should have approximately 90% of the original content and maybe about 10% syndicated content on your website.
Another way to avoid Google’s penalty for duplicate content (apart from giving proper attribution to the original content creator) is to tag such pages as no-index.
Because of the no-index tag, Google will not index such pages, and these pages won’t appear in the search results.
If you mark your pages with syndicated content as no-index then they won’t appear in search results. So what’s the use of such syndicated content in this case?
Even if these pages don’t appear in search results, they can still be seen on the website itself.
You can create a separate section where you can post only the syndicated content of your website. You will still need to mention the original source of (attribution) the syndicated content that you publish on your website.
Whether you are syndicating your content on a third-party website or are hosting some other website’s content on your website, it is necessary to follow the above practices to reap the benefits of content syndication.
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