How do you optimize a page with Syndicated Content?
-
Content is syndicated legally (licensed). My questions are:
- What is the best way to approach this situation?
- Is there any a change to compete with the original site/page for the same keywords?
- Is it okay to do so? Will there be any negative SEO impact on my site?
-
It's tricky, honestly - even if the content is legitimately/legally syndicated and provides user value, it's still possible for Google to consider it "thin", low-value content. There are a lot of caveats, though:
(1) It's possible for two or more sites to both rank for a piece of content, but the winner usually depends on a mix of signals, ranging from Google's best guess as to the source to the authority of the domain. In some cases, it's possible for a strong syndicator to outrank the source.
(2) It really depends a lot on your content balance. If you use partially-syndicated content in pages with some unique content, you're usually a lot safer. If you use a small percentage of syndicated content across your site, you're also usually pretty safe - worst case, that content may just not rank or get filtered out. The problem is when you rely heavily on syndicated content - it can make your entire site look low-value and trigger issues with Panda.
(3) It depends a lot on the type of content. Many resellers use OEM product descriptions, for example. These pages often don't rank well (as they're plastered across the internet), but it's unusual to see them harm the entire site. If you have a blog that's just re-posts from other blogs (even completely legit ones), though, Google is just going to see your site as a copy and low-value.
If the content is solely for users and doesn't have SEO value for you, you can always NOINDEX it or rel-canonical to the source (cross-domain). That will prevent an risk. Usually, though, it does have some SEO value, so you don't want to block it entirely. In that case, I would just say proceed with caution. Content syndication is perfectly valid, but you don't want to over-use it.
-
Hi,
There is no negative effects affects your site, you can compete with original site with same keyword but your SEO must be powerful. you have to implement strong SEO campaign so you can beat your competitor. Syndicate does not matter but the way you optimize your webpage that is matter more.
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
-
Nuisance visitors to non active page. What's going on?
Hi Guys, for the past several months, I get high volume of searches on a non-existing page /h/9249823.html. These searches come from all over the world from different domains and have a zero session duration. They are automatically forwarded to my home page. The source re Google Analytics is 12-reasons-for-seo.com. The full referrer is 12.reasons-for-seo.com/seo2php. Any idea what is provoking this activity? Any chance it's screwing with my legitimate search results or rankings?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Lysarden0 -
Link with Anchor to header of the page: Keyword is ranking
I saw something interesting this week. I am doing research and spec-ing out a content page we are creating and one of our competitors "office Depot" on their phone repair page create exact match keywords that lead to an anchor that took you to the header of that pages. They were ranking first for all of those keywords with little to no links Thier strategy is the more local long tail that includes "near me" Have you guys ever seen this
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | uBreakiFix
this is the URL: https://www.officedepot.com/a/content/customer-service/samedayrepair/ They are ranking for these keywords ( Top 3 nationally ) iphone 6 repair near me iphone 7 repair near me I am assuming that this is both due to their PA and DA authority shifting the authority to itself, but it does not make sense how they are lacking in a lot of SEO low-hanging fruits like H1/H2 keyword saturation, URL, Title Tag within this content page....Anyone up for discussing this?0 -
Question regarding subdomains and duplicate content
Hey everyone, I have another question regarding duplicate content. We are planning on launching a new sector in our industry to satisfy a niche. Our main site works as a directory with listings with NAP. The new sector that we are launching will be taking all of the content on the main site and duplicating it on a subdomain for the new sector. We still want the subdomain to rank organically, but I'm having struggles between putting a rel=canonical back to main site, or doing a self-referencing canonical, but now I have duplicates. The other idea is to rewrite the content on each listing so that the menu items are still the same, but the listing description is different. Do you think this would be enough differentiating content that it won't be seen as a duplicate? Obviously make this to be part of the main site is the best option, but we can't do that unfortunately. Last question, what are the advantages or disadvantages of doing a subdomain?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
Page plumetting with a optimisation score of 97\. HELP
Hi everyone, One of my pages has an optimisation score of 93, but ranks in 50+ place. What on earth can I do to address this? It's a course page so I've added the 'course' schema. I've added all the alt tags to say the keyword, UX signals aren't bad. Keyword is in the title tag. It has a meta description. Added an extra 7 internal, anchor-rich links pointing at the page this week. Nothing seems to address it. Any ideas? Cheers, Rhys
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SwanseaMedicine1 -
One page sites
HI Guys, I need help with a one page site What is the best method to getting the lower pages indexed? Linking back to the site(Deeplinking) is looking impossible. Will this hurt my SEO? Are there any other tips on one page websites that you can recommend?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Duplicate content or not? If you're using abstracts from external sources you link to
I was wondering if a page (a blog post, for example) that offers links to external web pages along with abstracts from these pages would be considered duplicate content page and therefore penalized by Google. For example, I have a page that has very little original content (just two or three sentences that summarize or sometimes frame the topic) followed by five references to different external sources. Each reference contains a title, which is a link, and a short abstract, which basically is the first few sentences copied from the page it links to. So, except from a few sentences in the beginning everything is copied from other pages. Such a page would be very helpful for people interested in the topic as the sources it links to had been analyzed before, handpicked and were placed there to enhance user experience. But will this format be considered duplicate or near-duplicate content?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | romanbond0 -
Campaign landing pages
Hi At our company we decided we wanted to reach out to a more global audience. So we bought a bank of domains for different countries, e.g. ".asia". Some are our company name, others are things like "barcelonaprivatejets.com." We then put up single page websites for each of these domains, which link to our main .com site. However, I don't know if this is good for our SEO or bad. I've seen so many different things written but I cannot find a definitive answer. The text will be different on all the pages, but being only one page, and the "design" being the same, will we get penalized in some way or another? I've also added links to 2/3 of them in the footer of our main site but now I'm reading that this is bad too - so should I remove these? If anyone also has any ideas of how better we could use these Country-specific domains I would be welcome to suggestions to that too! I am not an SEO person really, I'm a web developer, so this is all completely different to me. P.S My name is Michael not Andy.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | JetBookMike0 -
For traffic sent by the search engines, how much personalization/customization is allowed on a page if any?
If I want to better target my audience so I would like to be able to address the exact query string coming from the search engine. I'd also like to add relevant sections to the site based in the geo area they live in. Can I customize a small portion of the page to fit my visitors search query and geo area per the IP address? How much can I change a web page to better fit a user and still be within the search engine's guidelines?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Thos0030