How does Content Syndication Effect SEO

In this video, we are going to discuss the topic of how Google treats content syndication across multiple websites.

If Google finds multiple versions of the same content on different websites, they consider this duplicate content. You can refer to my video on what is duplicate content for a little bit more information on that. But essentially Google does not want to show multiple pages which have the same content if it can be avoided. So if they find these many different pages for a particular search which are relevant, but they look pretty much the same or very similar, then they’re going to filter those out and they’re going to pick one to show.

The problem for you if you are doing content syndication is, this could quite easily be the one that’s not on your website. So you wrote an article on your website and then syndicate it to multiple other websites, then Google is quite luckily, or quite possible that Google could pick one of the syndicated versions of the page to show on their search results, and not the one you want, which is the one in your website.

The way that Google suggests that you get around this problem, is by linking, always make sure that there’s a link back from any syndicated versions of that page to the original article on your website or wherever the preferred version of that article appears.

Another situation to consider is if you’re syndicating your content across multiple mediums. For instance, you have a video (like this one) and you also transcribe that video into an article. So this is syndicated content – the content of the video and the content of the article are the same (it’s the same words) but multiple different mediums. And this is video reference will appear on Youtube, wherein the transcription appears on our website. So it doesn’t seem like Google is treating this as duplicate content at this stage, and perhaps they will in the future when they have become a bit more sophisticated and able to analyse video a little bit better, but this stage they don’t seem to be treating it as duplicate content. However I still suggest that you link back from syndicated versions of multiple mediums to preferred version. So for instance, we do in fact link from my Youtube videos in the description to the website here, where you can get the transcription and the video, and that’s the preferred version for us. So we recommend you do that as well.