|
|
Web News |
Vancouver firm major force in OpenID collaboration
The problem of having multiple Internet identities -- being forced to employ user names and passwords for every website that requires a sign-in -- may become a lot easier to handle. And that's thanks, in part, to Vancouver-based Sxip Identity, headed by entrepreneur Dick Hardt. Sxip -- a major force in the open-source OpenID 2.0 project aimed at giving users a...
Yahoo runs mobile phone advertising in 18 nations
Yahoo said on Sunday it has signed up top corporate advertisers to use its advertising system to run brand ads on mobile phones in 18 countries, marking a major diversification beyond computers. The Internet media company has begun offering its brand advertising to reach mobile phone users across markets in...
Canadian e-health sector could use a booster shot...
There's a host of opportunities for Canadian companies looking to serve the burgeoning electronic health record market, but insiders say serving the market is not going to be easy. A number of hospitals have already set up electronic record systems with patient information, and a national agency, Canada Health Infoway, has a...
Largest shared-memory supercomputer in Canada...
The Altix 4700, the most powerful shared-memory supercomputer in Canada, is now available to 350 scientists in Quebec, thanks to a major in-kind contribution from SGI Canada to the Quebec Network for High Performance Computing, a group comprising five university-level institutions (Université de Montréal, Université de Sherbrooke, Concordia University, Ecole...
Start-up demos quantum computer
About a year from now, banks, pharmaceutical companies and other large institutions will be able to rent time on a computer that calculates by studying the behavior of a niobium atom, according to D-Wave Systems. The Canadian company on Tuesday gave a public demonstration of Orion, its quantum computer, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. D-Wave said it is going to try to sell computing...
Canadian nuclear safety site defaced by hacker
Red-faced officials at Canada's nuclear safety watchdog on Thursday said they were probing how a hacker had managed to litter its official Web site with dozens of colour photographs of a nuclear explosion. The Ottawa Citizen newspaper said every media release on the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission's Web site had been labelled as a security breach on Wednesday.
|
|
 | |
|
02.14.07
Does Syndication Amount To A Duplicate Content Penalty?
 By Ross Dunn
This SEO answer is a follow-up to a common question I received from my recent article "The Most Common Reason for Dropped Rankings: Duplication".
To be as clear as possible with my answer I am going to break it down into two sections: one for those who syndicate their own content and the other for those who publish syndicated content.
Please keep in mind, however, duplicate content is not an exact science or anything close to that. As I wrote this article, I often imagined exceptions where a penalty would or would not take place. That said the following answers are based on what my experience dictates to be the most common scenarios.
Answer 1: Syndicating Your Own Content
If you are sending out your own content for syndication (on other websites) you need not worry yourself with duplicate content penalties because you are the original source of the article. However here is some winning strategies you should use to ensure you get the maximum benefit from your article.
First-off it is often beneficial not to syndicate your content right away but to wait a day or so after writing your article so that the search engines can index the content first on your own website. Why? Because if you syndicate your article before or at the same time you publish it on your own website a 3rd party site may post the article before you do. If that 3rd party happens to be highly credible your article might get spidered there before it does on your website which may reduce your website's exposure.
This next factor is the most important: all articles must have a link back to a copy of the article on your own website to establish ownership. This will show the search engines that you are the original content creator, which will provide some backlink benefits and increase the chances your article will be found in searches. In some cases, like StepForth's, we have chosen to point the article to our flagship home page to build backlinks; another reasonable choice.
The downside to such a technique is the original article on our news website is not often credited with the first publication because a source backlink does not exist.
Cost Effective Website and Network Monitoring
IPCheck Server Monitor - Free Download |
|
Answer 2: Syndicating Other People's Content
Publishing content that has recently been released for syndication will not result in a duplicate content penalty. Why? Because the content is fresh and the major search engines do not penalize fresh content. It is paramount to note however that publishing older content under the guise of new content is a bad idea and not recommended. For example, if you were to post an old article you found online you would be wasting your time as the search engines would compare this to their database and immediately notice the content is outdated and previously syndicated; they simply would ignore it.
So What Happens to the Majority of Duplicate Content?
Over time, duplicate content is weeded out of the search engine databases for the sake of search efficiency. Generally, the version of the article that is hosted on the most credible website or has the most backlinks (source credits from republishing) is considered the authority source and gets the bulk of the top rankings for that article. This is why sometimes, when looking through search results I occasionally find my own articles sourced from the more popular Search Engine Guide instead of my own site where they were originally posted.
When Does a Duplicate Content "Penalty" Occur?
For the most part, older duplicated content is simply ignored by search engines so the 'penalty' per se is really quite benign; meaning the page is not worth the bytes of space it uses. A major search engine such as Google would consider a SPAM penalty for a website that only consisted of content that had previously been syndicated or had repeatedly tried to pass of old content as new. A penalty might be as small as a drop in rankings or as significant as an outright blacklisting. How the ultimate decision is made is buried deep within Google's SPAM protection algorithms.
In Conclusion
If you syndicate your own content, you have nothing to be concerned about but ensure that anyone who syndicates your content gives you proper link credit.
If you republish syndicated content, you need to be sure the content is fresh, topical to your website and that you have the rights to post it. Ultimately, I suggest following the lead of the best marketing sites on the Internet and intersperse your own freshly written content within your website. After all, over time syndicated content loses its lustre in rankings due to its nature of duplicity so if you have your own unique content your site will fare better in the end.
About the Author:
Ross Dunn is the CEO and founder of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc., an SEO firm that has been providing expert services since 1997. Ross´s considerable experience in the world of search has made him a respected writer for countless publications and an SEO consultant for small business and Fortune 500 web properties.
|
