Syndicated content outperforming our hard work!
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Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. Our goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states.
To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content/media is 100% original.A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entries are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.)
(I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances.)
I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources???
The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?
Are they bound to fade away?
While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states.
OR
Is our competitor's site bound to fade away?
Thanks, gang, hope all of you have a great 2013!
Wayne
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Basically, Google treats Syndicated content and duplicate content differently. So, if the competitor you are talking about is following the best practices for syndicated content and if Google sees their website or webpage to be more prominent (Because of more relevant/ related contents on that domain, SEO optimization or popularity etc.) and more relevant (Than the original creator of the content or the other syndication partners), in relation to the keywords searched for , then Google will show the content on that particular syndication partner's page (in this situation the competitor you are talking about) rather than that of original creator's page.And, no, as long as they are following the best practices for syndicated content, they won't have any problem. But, it could happen that in the future some other content syndication partner might be given more prominence over the other, if that page on that website has leveraged the content better or even the original creator might given more prominence if they do a good job at optimizing their syndicated content strategy.
As far as syndicated content goes, Google says this:
“If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.”
So, in a nut shell...there are no penalties for properly syndicated content, but, just the fact that Google will decide which page to display based on it's prominence and best practices. But, yeah, if they are not following the best practices for content syndication, then, Google will start to see them as duplicate pages, and, then it is a different story.
BTW, here is a post that will be of help to you which talks about how the original creators of the content can leverage it:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/28/content-creators-benefit-from-new-seo/
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"The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?"
Your hard work.
Stop allowing them to use your content and they should not appear in your SERPs.
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The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?
You have a stronger link profile but I think they are winning the SERPs because they post "Recent" links on their homepage that link to news and user submissions. This in turn lets crawlers syndicate the latest submissions quicker, their homepage is crawled more often, and they rank quicker/better because of the Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) factor.
I recommend you try doing the same thing and see if that helps you.
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I also only found 5 instances of your articles being sourced - https://www.google.com/search?q=site:accidentin.com+intext%3Afindmyaccident.com
What kinds of kw are they outranking you for? Do you have a rss feed or how are they scraping you content?
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In general, scraper sites are not supposed to do well and will probably lose value but I've seen several examples where they are performing really well.
Cheers & Good Luck,
Oleg
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