Syndicating your content to other platforms will increase your views and boost your brand awareness.
Popular syndication platforms include Medium, Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Many established media outlets allow you to feature high-quality, relevant content on their websites.
Publishers who syndicate content have two ways to specify their site as a source.
- A link to the original article. This is a weak signal to Google (plus, links are usually No Follow), but you can still drive some of the traffic from the syndicated content to your own site.
- a rel= “regular” The link element pointing to the source is a stronger signal and has the potential to transmit External Link Equity Back to the article, however, not all sites offer this option – for example, LinkedIn and Substack don’t allow regular expressions.
Like the link and For search engine and referral traffic purposes, use canonical content when possible, but even if both options are set, Google may choose to index and rank the syndicated content instead of the original article.
We knew for a long time rel= “regular” It is not a command. To eliminate the inside Duplicate contentGoogle decides which pages to index and rank based on internal links and other signals, such as content depth and relevance.
The same goes for cross-site canonical tags. Google may rank non-original versions of syndicated content based on domain authority and external links. Google’s John Mueller Confirmed When asked why Google ranks syndicated content higher than original, Mueller responded:
Generally, when you syndicate or republish content to multiple platforms, you increase the chances that other platforms will show up in search results above your own website in exchange for increased visibility within that platform…
…rel=canonical is not a directive, even within the same site, and it doesn’t make sense for search engines to treat pages as equivalent if they are different. You should use `noindex` on the alternative version if you want “your” version to appear in search results.
Unfortunately, I Not familiar with syndication platforms No index A page on their site.
In the same thread, Mueller warned website owners not to noindex their own content for fear of a duplicate content penalty, adding that if they can’t noindex syndicated content, they should let Google decide, and that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty.
SEO impact
Although content syndication is not a search engine optimization tactic, it can still benefit your content and brand exposure.
There is no way to absolutely guarantee that Google will recognize your site as the original source and rank your content accordingly.
However, there are ways to make content syndication SEO friendly.
- Choose a syndication partner rel= “regular” A tag pointing back to your site (not sure if Google follows this)
- To keep your site’s content original, create different versions of your articles when syndicating them. This is time-consuming and only possible if you syndicate your content manually. It doesn’t guarantee that your articles will rank higher than the syndicated version. Nevertheless, many search engine optimizers (including me) still recommend this.
In other words, syndicated content can be a useful marketing strategy because it reaches a wider audience, but it does little for search engine optimization.
