Does link building through content syndication still actually work?
-
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)?
-
Thanks. I would love to hear if anyone has seen any SEO benefit from just straight syndication.
-
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.
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
-
Worthwhile for SEO to buy a website with great links which is inactive for 30days and revive it with all its content and after a while transfer it to my core site?
When moving the content after a while to a subdirectory of my core website I would copy the full content and later further improve it. Would the external links that I redirect via 301 be counting similar to links I had earned in the first place? I understand that 301 redirect normally just implies minimal loss of link power. Topic of the site I consider to acquire is loosely related to my core site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Is a link inside a video player considered an inbound link from the domain the player is embedded in?
Good afternoon...We just added a link to our homepage inside the menu of our video player. In the link below, if you click on the menu icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, you'll see a "Powered by WellcomeMat" link at the bottom of the menu. http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/kt216e25172416n/-Rancho-Santa-Fe/Ca/92067/16596-Via-Lago-Azul/1234567890/ My question for the community is would that link be considered an inbound link from any site that has the video player embedded? So hypothetically, the video player is embedded into www.abcd.com. If a user would click on that link and go to our homepage, would search engines recognize that as an inbound link from abcd.com, even though it sits within our video player? And most of the time, the player sits within an iframe. So that's why I'm not 100% sure. Thanks for reading and for your help! It's much appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian7201 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Client is paranoid about Google penguin penalty from getting links from a new website they are building
We have a client that is creating a new promotional website that consists of videos, brands and product reviews (SITE B). After a visitor watches a video on SITE B they will be given a "click to purchase" option that will lead them to the original website (SITE A). Our client is paranoid that since all the outgoing links on the new SITE B are going to the original SITE A there might be algorithm penalty (for one website or both). I find this very unlikely and even recommend "no follow" coding for a peace of mind. However are there any resources/links out there that can back up my argument that they will be alright? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanguardCommunications0 -
Relevancy of link profile
Hi! I'm doing an audit of http://www.stevesims.com/ at the moment, who has had rankings for 'website designers' plummet recently. Looking at the site, there a few things to do with on-page and on-site optimisation, but nothing major. Instead, I think the link profile is the issue. There's a lot of site wide links from non-relevant sites, but I'm struggling to see anything else. Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Is this link being indexed?
link text Deadline: Monday, Sep 30, 2013 link text I appreciate the help guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jameswalkerson0 -
Content not indexed
How come i google content that resides on my website and on my homepage and my site doesn't come up? I know the content is unique i wrote that. I have a feeling i have some kind of a crawling issue but cannot determine what it is. I ran the crawling test and other tools and didn't find anything. Google shows me that pages are indexed but yet its weird try googling snippets of content and you'll see my site isnt anywhere. Have you experienced that before? First i thought it was penalized but i submitted the reconsideration request and it came back clear, No manual spam action found. And i did not get any message in my GWMT either. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CMTM0 -
How does a competing website with clearly black hat style SEO tactics, have a far higher domain authority than our website that only uses legitimate link building tactics?
Through SEO Moz link analysis tools, we looked at a competing websites external followed links and discovered a large number of links going to Blog pages with domain authorities in the 90's (their blog page authorities were between 40 and 60), however the single blog post written by this website was exactly the same in every instance and had been posted in August 2011. Some of these blog sites had 160 or so links linking back to this competing website whose domain authority is 49 while ours is 28, their Moz Trust is 5.43 while ours is 5.18. An example of some of the blogs that link to the competing website are: http://advocacy.mit.edu/coulter/blog/?p=13 http://pest-control-termite-inspection.posterous.com/\ However many of these links are "no follow" and yet still show up on Open Site Explorer as some of this competing websites top linking pages. Admittedly, they have 584 linking root domains while we have only 35, but if most of them are the kind of websites posted above, we don't understand how Google is rewarding them with a higher domain authority. Our website is www.anteater.com.au Are these tactics now the only way to get ahead?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter.Huxley590