Content Syndication: More Than a Traffic Boost

Author: Michael Schreiber / Source: Content Marketing Institute

I learned content distribution, syndication, and SEO very much by accident.

Here’s the backstory: In 2005 I was firmly rooted in the world of documentaries. I worked on projects for ABC News, HBO, The New York Times and Frontline – always as a freelancer. I worked on films about terrorism in Europe, Abu Ghraib, Americans preparing for the apocalypse, and more. One of the Frontline programs, however, proved to be prophetic. I didn’t know it then, but The Secret History of the Credit Card would change the course of my career.

Toward the end of my time in documentaries and TV, the work got a little weird. At one point, within the space of a month, I’d gone from producing episodes of Frontline for The New York Times to producing an episode of Wife Swap. I was getting married and needed a change. I also needed health insurance.

Eventually, I saw an opening at the financial news site TheStreet.com and, based on my experience with the credit-card documentary, I landed a job there as managing editor of MainStreet.com, a new site focused on personal finance. The MainStreet editorial team was a fun, scrappy group, which was good because we were functioning as a startup within the company. We needed traffic and we were new, so generating awareness in a crowded personal finance beat was not easy. Over the years I’ve worked in personal finance for a variety of media organizations, big and small, established and startup. Now I’ve started my own company helping businesses of all types develop editorial and content strategies that make sense. It should come as no surprise that generating awareness is just about everyone’s top goal.

One of the most important tools in creating that kind of awareness, I’ve learned over the years, is content distribution. I’m not talking about paid, cost-per-click-oriented content discovery channels like Outbrain (though these tools can be highly effective in a few ways). I’m talking about syndication where sites like MSN, Yahoo, AOL/The Huffington Post, USA Today, and many others run your articles, and often those articles include links to related editorial content on your site. There are variations of this arrangement. For example, in some cases there may be a revenue share of the ads sold by the media outlet against your content hosted on its site, but the vast majority of the syndication deals I’ve put together involved no money. (See key content distribution terms near end of this post.)

Google eyes syndicated content

When I first encountered this strategy, it seemed like it was all about eyeballs and traffic. Getting one of your articles featured on a big news portal’s home page carousel meant that millions of people would be exposed to your story and learn about your brand. More importantly, getting an article featured on the home page of a big web portal could lead to what is often referred to as a “fire hose” of traffic, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of people hitting your site over the course of hours or days.

Scoring that fire hose of traffic was often considered the big win in the world of content syndication, but over time as I moved into different editorial roles, I learned that direct traffic was just the tip of the iceberg. Traffic from syndication partners is inherently spiky – there’s often no way to predict when your article will get prime placement on a site you don’t control – and prime placement (like the home page carousel, for example) is the key to getting that fire hose of traffic. One day an editor at one of those portals may like one of your stories and share it with the world, and the next day they don’t and it ends up buried in a vertical that sees relatively little traffic.

Regardless of whether those syndicated articles find the eyeballs or languish on pages unseen, one segment of the audience sees everything: search engines.

Google, the dominant search engine, along with Bing and others, sees these syndicated articles on news sites with powerful domain authority, and, more importantly, sees the links in the articles pointing to articles on the syndicators’ home websites. Inbound links from authoritative news sites can signal that the target sites have strong content, and the articles are solid, trustworthy pieces about the subjects in question.

Search engines may be more likely to rank these sites and those articles higher in their results, which in turn means more organic (aka free) traffic over time. While syndicated articles may be hit or miss when it comes to that fire hose of traffic, they are also potentially helpful when it comes to growing organic traffic to your website. That organic traffic, when managed well, can grow considerably over time and usually isn’t spiky at all.

Now, there are some caveats. First, not all syndication partners give credit for the links to your website. They may code those links as “no-follow,” which essentially communicates to search engines that the links should be ignored. Secondly, Google and other search engines change their algorithms regularly, and the way they view syndicated content will likely evolve. In fact, earlier this year Google suggested that syndicating articles solely for the purposes of link building was inadvisable and provided a variety of best practices to avoid a penalty, including adding those “no-follow” tags to links.

If I’m reading the Google tea leaves right, I get where it is coming from. Content syndication shouldn’t be all about link building. You need to be committed to investing in the creation of a strong editorial team, because you believe that, in the long run, search algorithms and fire hoses aside, great content – on your site or others – represents a powerful way to attract and interact with your audience.