Syndicated content outperforming our hard work!
-
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
-
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/
-
"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.
-
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.
--
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?
--
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Third part http links on the page source: Social engineering content warning from Google
Hi, We have received "Social engineering content" warning from Google and one of our important page and it's internal pages have been flagged as "Deceptive site ahead". We wonder what's the reason behind this as Google didn't point exactly to the specific part of the page which made us look so to the Google. We don't employ any such content on the page and the content is same for many months. As our site is WP hosted, we used a WordPress plugin for this page's layout which injected 2 http (non-https) links in our page code. We suspect if this is the reason behind this? Any ideas? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz1 -
Are online tools considered thin content?
My website has a number of simple converters. For example, this one converts spaces to commas
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ConvertTown
https://convert.town/replace-spaces-with-commas Now, obviously there are loads of different variations I could create of this:
Replace spaces with semicolons
Replace semicolons with tabs
Replace fullstops with commas Similarly with files:
JSON to XML
XML to PDF
JPG to PNG
JPG to TIF
JPG to PDF
(and thousands more) If somoene types one of those into Google, they will be happy because they can immediately use the tool they were hunting for. It is obvious what these pages do so I do not want to clutter the page up with unnecessary content. However, would these be considered doorway pages or thin content or would it be acceptable (from an SEO perspective) to generate 1000s of pages based on all the permutations?1 -
Duplicate Content Product Descriptions - Technical List Supplier Gave Us
Hello, Our supplier gives us a small paragraph and a list of technical features for our product descriptions. My concern is duplicate content. Here's what my current plan is: 1. To write as much unique content (rewriting the paragraph and adding to it) as there is words in the technical description list. Half unique content half duplicate content. 2. To reword the technical descriptions (though this is not always possible) 3. To have a custom H1, Title tag and meta description My question is, is the list of technical specifications going to create a duplicate content issue, i.e. how much unique content has to be on the page for the list that is the same across the internet does not hurt us? Or do we need to rewrite every technical list? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Duplicate Content issue in Magento
I am getting duplicate content issue because of the following product URL in my Magento store. http://www.sitename.com/index.php/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates http://www.sitename.com/sports-nutritions/carbohydrates Please can someone guide me on how to solve it. Thanks Guys
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | webteamBlackburn0 -
What tools do you use to find scraped content?
This hasn’t been an issue for our company so far, but I like to be proactive. What tools do you use to find sites that may have scraped your content? Looking forward to your suggestions. Vic
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
Indexing content behind a login
Hi, I manage a website within the pharmaceutical industry where only healthcare professionals are allowed to access the content. For this reason most of the content is behind a login. My challenge is that we have a massive amount of interesting and unique content available on the site and I want the healthcare professionals to find this via Google! At the moment if a user tries to access this content they are prompted to register / login. My question is that if I look for the Google Bot user agent and allow this to access and index the content will this be classed as cloaking? I'm assuming that it will. If so, how can I get around this? We have a number of open landing pages but we're limited to what indexable content we can have on these pages! I look forward to all of your suggestions as I'm struggling for ideas now! Thanks Steve
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | stever9990 -
Duplicate Content
Hi, I have a website with over 500 pages. The website is a home service website that services clients in different areas of the UK. My question is, am I able to take down the pages from my URL, leave them down for say a week, so when Google bots crawl the pages, they do not exist. Can I then re upload them to a different website URL, and then Google wont penalise me for duplicate content? I know I would of lost juice and page rank, but that doesnt really matter, because the site had taken a knock since the Google update. Thanks for your help. Chris,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chrisellett0 -
How is this obvious black hat technique working in Google?
Get ready to have your minds blown. Try a search in Google for any of these: proform tour de france tour de france trainer tour de france exercise bike proform tour de france bike In each instance you will notice that Proform.com, the maker of the bike, is not #1. In fact, the same guy is #1 every time, and this is the URL: www.indoorcycleinstructor.com/tour-de-france-indoor-cycling-bike Here's the fun part. Click on that result and guess where you go? Yup, Proform.com. The exact same page ranking right behind it in fact. Actually, this URL first redirects to an affiliate link and that affiliate link redirects to Proform.com. I want to know two things. First, how on earth did they do this? They got to #1 ahead of Proform's own page. How was it done? But the second question is, how have they not been caught? Are they cloaking? How does Google rank a double 301 redirect in the top spot whose end destination is the #2 result? PS- I have a site in this industry and this is how I caught it and why it is of particular interest. Just can't figure out how it was done or why they have not been caught. Not because I plan to copy them, but because I plan to report them to Google but want to have some ammo.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DanDeceuster0