What is Content Syndication and How can it Improve SEO?

A major problem small website owners face is scaling the visibility of their content. But what if there was a way to increase views on your content without doing anything too extra? It’s pretty sure you would jump on it. Content syndication can help you attract more views and reach audiences that your website would normally not reach.

Content syndication is the practice of republishing existing content on third-party websites. It is taking advantage of websites with a wider reach to improve the visibility of your content. How exactly can this improve your SEO? You’re about to find out. But first, let’s address some concerns you may have.

Content Syndication Concerns

1. Duplicate Content: since you are basically publishing the same thing, but on multiple websites, it is easy to get flagged for duplicate content. Contrary to popular ideas, however, Google does not penalize websites for duplicate content. But it doesn’t encourage it either. Nevertheless, canonical tags can help you get around this.
2. Outranking your own platform: take, for example, that you republish a particular post on your blog on a bigger platform. When a person makes a search and it matches your content, the post on the bigger platform is likelier to rank higher. In this way, content syndication may be counterproductive for building your blog or brand visibility. To avoid this, you may wait for some time for the original content to be indexed and start ranking before syndicating on another platform.

Why should you consider content syndication?

The sole aim of content syndication is exposure. Syndication is useful for boosting content visibility and building brand awareness. It might not be a long-term content strategy, and it might not be suitable for every type of brand as well. But if you want to get your posts in front of many more pairs of eyes, then syndication is a good way to go about it.

Use content syndication to attract the type of audience you want. Content syndication is a useful strategy for small brands and businesses because they are able to attract audiences from third-party websites that they are unable to attract on their own. The first step to marketing is awareness, and syndication helps you to achieve that.

Also, content syndication is a source of referral traffic. Most republished posts have a short note at the end linking to where the content originally appeared. This could improve your link building strategy.

How to Syndicate Content

• Your brand/business website. You can also syndicate content to your own website for posts buy klonopin with mastercard that first appeared somewhere else.
• Third-party websites. Though many sites frown at content syndication because they fear duplicate content issues, there are many websites that don’t mind republishing already-published content. You only have to find the right platforms.
• Social media networks. Platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit, and Quora are excellent for content syndication. Social networks even do more than giving your content visibility; they could also bring engagements, signals that your content is working for your audience. Also, you don’t have to pass through editors or seek any form of approval. Republish your content as LinkedIn articles, Facebook Instant Articles, or Quora answers.
• Publishing platforms such as Medium and Tumblr. These blogging platforms allow users to republish content that has appeared previously elsewhere. However, for this to be effective, you most probably need to have built a significant following already.

Pitching to Syndication Partners

When planning content syndication, you would want to target reputable, high-quality websites. This is important for two reasons: one, to reach a wider audience and two, to build a positive reputation.

Experts at VFMSEO say “remember that the highest benefit of content syndication is exposure. Therefore, you need to find websites within your niche to syndicate your content. This is important because visibility is useless if it is not coming from your target audience.”

To get your content accepted, you need to build a relationship with editors of the third-party websites by sending pitches. If you are have been guest-posting, pitching for content syndication should not be a hassle.

Content Syndication and Link Building

Content syndication is not a link building strategy, but that does not mean backlinks are useless. To avoid funneling rankings away from the original source of a piece of content, always include (or remind the editor to include) a canonical tag to the original on subsequent syndicates.

A canonical tag (rel=canonical) is an HTML tag that signals to a search engine bot which version of a post you want to rank in search results. By doing so, the value from third-party webpages where your content appears would revert to your own website. Also, a simple ‘originally published/appeared on [link to source]’ at the end of a post would do.

Conclusion

It feels like a waste of effort to be churning excellent content without having a large enough audience to view it. If this describes your website, then you should consider content syndication. Posting and promoting your quality content might increasingly boost your traffic, but syndication would potentially accelerate that growth.