Syndication, Duplicate Content and Ranking

Syndicating content you make to other blogs and websites is a good thing, especially if you get inbound links and traffic from it (which is one of your purposes). But it also creates duplicate content issues, forcing the search engines to determine which content source is the original one that deserves the better rank for the content. What is the smart thing to do?

Vanessa Fox started a string on ranking on syndicated content last May. She offers several ideas for how to boost your original content, the most important of which is to include an absolute link back to your original content in anything you syndicate to others.  Yet, Google et al might still consider the syndicated use of the content as a higher ranking because the website or blog it is on is considered more authoritative.  The search engines will still try to eliminate duplicate content, and your original work might be the version that gets eliminated.

A hyperactive version of this problem is when your content gets scraped and re-used on somebody else’s website (a client of mine produces the best event calendar in our county and it is repeatedly “borrowed” by scrapers).  How can we ensure that we get credit for our good work?

I don’t think there’s a 100% solution to this.  However, Google’s Webmaster Blog assures us that they “look at various signals to determine which site is the original one”.  Adding the inbound links to your site will always help, obviously, but beyond that you need to persist in keeping your content clean (limit the duplicate content that is unnecessary) and identify the files you want search engines to see in your Sitemap XML submission.  You do not want to give up the benefits of syndication, and you cannot stop scrapers — you can only make sure your content is fresh, well-formulated technically, and syndicated to people who will play fair with you in giving credit for your content.