Syndication Vs. Duplicate Content

One of the biggest fears that many online marketers have, and this is thanks in part to Google’s own stated policies and in part to SEOs beating the fear drum, is duplicate content. Sometimes it is a founded fear and other times it isn’t.

Duplicate content is when you have the exact same content on two different pages of your website or on different websites. Syndication is a different matter altogether.

Syndication is the licensing of your content to be published in various places around the web. The syndicated author gets a byline on every article and on every website on which that article appears. The publisher gets quality content from an author who can back up her writing skill with expert knowledge. It’s a win-win.

The syndicated article also lends itself to other benefits for the author. You can get quality backlinks to your website, new traffic to your business, and prestige for being published in a reputable publication.

With duplicate content, you get none of those. You get one byline and that’s it. The search engines discount the duplicate content and the benefits fall by the wayside.

So what’s the difference? How can you ensure syndication instead of duplicate content?

Generally, the distinguishing characteristic of duplicate content is that it does not come with an attribution link. The content sits on several websites and looks like it’s been published on each website with no connection to each other. This is bad. It does no one any good. The search engines will just give credit to the first article that was published – and you better hope that was you.

With syndication, you get the link. You get the credit. Everyone knows who wrote the article and all those inbound links giving you credit help you rank higher in the search engines for the keyword that content was optimized for.