Sometimes Blog Syndication Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

I realize that for many site owners and bloggers, having their company or personal blog picked up and syndicated on a popular industry site is a huge boon. It provides a ever-growing source of quality links, exposes your brand to a wide audience time and time again, helps your content get shared more frequently and (hopefully) drives more traffic to your site in the long run. But a few months ago I realized that blog syndication isn’t always as great as many think it is and sometimes it’s not worth it. Here’s the story…

My company’s Internet marketing blog was being syndicated on a popular SEO industry website and I was really excited about it. Getting my content published on this site was a big win across the board; it meant a ton of brand exposure to the right audience and would help get my content into more hands thanks to the social networking prowess of this site. This wasn’t a spammy or generic blog that pulled RSS feeds at will, this was the big time and I was really excited about the potential of what being syndicated on this site would mean for my company.

After a few months of syndication I was digging through my website’s analytics to see what kind of traffic I was getting from the site and I was surprised at how low the number one. Seeing as how at least one blog post was getting published on this heavily trafficked site each day I had been expecting to see more. That’s when I realized, the other site was reaping most of the benefits of my content. Each post was getting a lot of social shares on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but people were sharing the content directly from that other site, not coming back to mine (the original and cited author) to share it. This meant that all those social signals being generated thanks to my content were actually helping the industry blog and not my blog. Sure, I was getting a link back as the author but it seemed like a drop in the bucket compared to what the other blog was getting.

Since my company blog is hosted on the same URL as my company website, which has been online for several years, the blog benefits from the SEO and search engine trust factor of my company site and blog posts are typically indexed within a day or do after going live. After a little checking I realized that the syndicates blog posts, which were being automatically posted to the other blog whenever they went live on my site, where getting indexed within a few hours! Since the industry blog was so popular and so trusted the search engine spiders were crawling and indexing my content on that site before they actually got to mine! Even with the author link back I started to worry a little bit—since the other blog is getting the content indexed first would my site every get flagged for stealing content? The search algorithm isn’t perfect, even though it is pretty smart; could this syndicated content actually come back to haunt me? I wasn’t willing to wait around long enough to find out.

In the end I decided to pull the syndicated blog posts and become a guest author on the site, writing one or two posts each month. I realized I’d rather get fewer links in the end than run the risk of devaluing my own content in the long run. I want to make sure that my site and my brand are the primary beneficiaries surrounding any activity with regards to my content, not another blog.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing (http://www.brickmarketing.com/), a white hat SEO and link building services company based in Boston, Massachusetts. Brick Marketing also hosts full-day SEO workshops in cities around the country.

Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or nick@brickmarketing.com