Does link building through content syndication still actually work?

[nicole.healthline]

I stumbled across this old SEOmoz whilteboard http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-leveraging-syndicated-content-effectively and was wondering if this is still a valid technique given the Panda & Penguin updates.

Is anyone here still doing this (and seeing results)?

[nicole.healthline]

Thanks. I would love to hear if anyone has seen any SEO benefit from just straight syndication.

[matbennett]

Blimey - you've been trawling the archives!  Ahh... doesn't rand look fresh faced back in 2010 !?

This is definitely trickier these days.  I think that Google is now better at understanding who the originator of the content is and also like duplicate content even less now than then. So harder to do and more risk for getting it wrong.

Making it unique is still the way to go. However I think that you are largely now only going to get the benefit from the unique part, rather than the whole part. Using syndicated content as a catalyst for UGC can work well. I've just been helping a site that does this: They manually syndicate content from a variety of sources, but their user base tends to add a few hundred words of response quite quickly.  This seems to work best when they are also picking up links to the content.

So, yes I think it still works - it's just harder.  I'd definitely take the "value add" approach rather than trying to be the authority though.