What is content syndication? How to republish without hurting your SEO

Syndication puts your best work in front of an audience you haven't reached yet. A trade publication, a partner's blog or a larger news site may already have the readers you want. For the publisher taking your piece, it fills their pages with useful material. Both sides benefit when the setup is clear.

A syndicated article can also carry a link back to your site. That matters because Google's starter guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled.

Google's Publisher Center help explains the core problem. It says that if there are many versions of the same article, it can be difficult for our systems to identify the original article. If a partner's copy looks like the main version, it could be the one that shows up in search, even though you wrote it.

Google notes that articles in Google News are selected by automated systems, and that there are a few ways news sites can help it find the original version. The guidance is written for news publishers, but the logic applies to any business that lets others republish its articles.

Google's recommended setup asks the partner site, not you, to add a small tag to their copy:

• To keep the copy out of Google News only, the partner can add a robots meta tag addressed to Googlebot-News with the value noindex. Google says this stops Google News from indexing the syndicated versions of your content.
• To keep the copy out of both Google News and Google Search, the partner can add a robots meta tag addressed to Googlebot with the value noindex, which stops Google's main crawler from indexing that copy.

It's tempting to use a canonical link pointing back to the original. Google says otherwise. Its tip: the canonical link element is not recommended for avoiding duplication by syndication partners, because syndicated articles are often very different in overall content from the original. Partners should use the noindex meta tags instead.

When the same article appears on more than one page of your own site, the canonical link element is the right tool. Google's Publisher Center help says that for publishing the same article on multiple pages within your own site, you can use the rel="canonical" link element.

Google's canonicalization documentation describes rel="canonical" as a strong signal that the specified URL should become canonical, and recommends adding a self-referencing canonical link to the canonical page itself. It also warns against mixed signals, such as naming one URL as canonical in your sitemap and a different one in a rel="canonical" link.

Syndication works because it's done with permission and credit. Republishing without them is something else. Google's spam policies describe abusive scraping, which includes republishing content from other sites without adding any original content or value, or even citing the original source. The same policy covers copying content and changing it only slightly, for example by swapping in synonyms.

Google's spam policies also cover scale. Under scaled content abuse, Google lists scraping feeds, search results, or other content to generate many pages where little value is provided to users, and stitching or combining content from different pages without adding value. A site filled with other people's articles and nothing of its own risks looking like that. One well-chosen syndicated piece with your commentary is a different thing from a feed of someone else's work.

If you republish other people's work on your own site, Google's helpful content questions set the bar. They ask whether content that draws on other sources avoids simply copying or rewriting those sources and instead adds substantial value and originality. Add your own commentary, examples or analysis, or don't republish it.

1. Publish on your own site first, so the original exists before any copies.
2. Agree in writing on what the partner may republish and how they credit you.
3. Ask for a clear link back to your original article.
4. Ask the partner to add the appropriate noindex meta tag to their copy.
5. Use rel="canonical" only for duplicates within your own site.
6. When you republish others, add real value and cite the source.

Revisit each arrangement once a year. Check that partner copies still carry their noindex tag and still link back to you, because a site redesign on their side can drop either one without anyone noticing.

Content syndication can multiply the reach of good work. A few lines of agreement up front keep the original credited to the person who wrote it.