Syndication is what it is all about unless you are in Panda House

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   bgamallposted 12 years ago

   If you are in the Panda house this does not apply, but syndication is the name of the game: http://www.borowitzreport.com/syndicate/

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   SunSevenposted 12 years ago

   HP thinks otherwise.

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      bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      HP is in the Panda House. It is sort of like being in the dog house.

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   thisisoliposted 12 years ago

   Syndication through canonicalization is in my opinion a great way to increase your position in the SERPs. Allowing other sites to just use your content however is rarely a good move.

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      bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      You demand a link back of course. Syndication is accepted practice as it gets name recognition.

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      SunSevenposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Oli, what about getting into google news?, I do not remember, but I read somewhere that, if we have enough quality content which are updated frequently, we can submit our sites to GNews.
      
      Wouldn't that help us to get some temporary traffic, at least, if not ranking?
      
      Your views, please.
      
      Best Regards

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   Sally's Troveposted 12 years ago

   Syndication has a long history starting in the paper trade. Think comic strips, gossip columns, and news feeds like AP and UPI.
   
   The economics behind traditional syndication are clear--a syndication service pays content providers and markets that content to news providers.
   
   What's the immediate economic benefit to content providers of a "syndication" service like borowitzreport.com?

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   SunSevenposted 12 years ago

   I wonder why we were introduced the news capsules, not a very long time ago. HP were paying those sources to display content from them (partly at least) on our hubs by way of backlinks?

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      Sally's Troveposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Good question. I can't wrap my head around how that economic dynamic might work, except that the HP news capsule was a convenience offered to HP writers only because it was an existing Google feature. In other words, I think, HP didn't pay any real dollars for using this service. Perhaps it was a kind of barter thing, as you suggest. LOLOLOL The US IRS maybe got into this, and that's the reason news capsules on HP are discontinued.

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         bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         You can get RSS news feeds from anywhere.

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            Sally's Troveposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Yes, that's understood, and doesn't address the question.

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               bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               Then why doesn't HP bypass the google and get news from somewhere else? Why wouldn't google want their news disseminated throughout the web? It makes no sense why they would not want that.

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                  Sally's Troveposted 12 years agoin reply to this

                  The Google news feed is free (barring that ephemeral Internet bartering business). AP and the others cost, as I imagine any valid syndicator does, at least for now.
                  
                  This now brings up the question of whether the Google news feed is valid at all. Maybe HP's been thinking about that, too, although I'm not inclined to give them that much credit just yet. The Google news feed, if you care to think about it, is a report of a source of a source of a source. It's all third or fourth hand info.
                  
                  Get a "wire" to AP services and pay for it. That's where the news is.

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   thisisoliposted 12 years ago

   First off, I think it is important to clarify a few points here.  First off, sites that work solely by syndicating their own unique content (From my own research) Have not done well post panda.  Infact most sites which syndicate their own content to thousands of sites as duplicate content receive very little beenfit from it at all.
   
   Using the canonical tag is a way to legitamize this.  Just sending your own content to other sites is a waste of time. And with Google's stronger focus on domain quality, it now means you can get outranked by your own content.
   
   Placing your own content on major sites is where the backlink can have more value than having the article on your own site place number one on Google. but lets face it, how many of us are syndicated with the New York Times, I know of one, and he isn't here anymore.
   
   Syndicating to Google News is a great idea, for one reason, it instantly increases your chances of having an article place near the top of Google regardless of SERPs. Look at the top of Google for Obama Killed, see the news at the top rather than a website, you tell me what you think people will click on first.
   
   As with all things, you simply have to weight the pro's and cons.
   
   A Canonical link is not a backlink, but there is strong evidence that a site which uses syndicates content should canonocalize an article, and that doing so provides more benefit for the syndicator and syndicatee in the long run.

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      bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      Come on Oli: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/businessinsider.com#
      
      BI breezed through Panda and their articles show up elsewhere.

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   Sally's Troveposted 12 years ago

   What is a canonical tag?

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      thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      In basic terms?
      
      It is something that tells search engines that the original version of what is on the page can be found at a different location.
      
      I am actually in the process of building a testbed site which accepts duplicate articles, but writers have to include the original location of the work in the canonical field.
      
      This is an experiment, but I think it will show favourable results based on the findings of others.

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         bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         This is bunk, because my articles published at Hubpages and were syndicated on BI are now showing higher on BI and the Hubpage articles are way down the list if found at all.
         
         You don't get it again, Hubpages and a few other sites have been singled out and Google's ethics are in question here.

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            thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Business insider is not giving canonical URLs to the content it receives from syndicates, i have no idea how it handles work it syndicates to others. Also the domain hit that Hubpages took has dropped many sites down below scraped content.

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            thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            I do get it this is an algorithmic change, I am going to tell you this one more time
            
            Backlinks - Yutube and BI both have vastly more backlinks than Hubpages.
            
            Social Media - Both Youtube and BI have vastly more social activity (Public likes etc) than Hubpages.
            
            Reduction in quantity of content - Neither Youtube or BI have had a mass exodus on otherwise well performing content.

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               bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

               The exodus came after Panda, not before. What is your point?
               
               And Hubpages had a lot of backlinks before Panda, right?
               
               And I am not sure what you mean by canonical. I write an article at BI. It has a link set up with the article title in it. Then I have permission to share it with another site. That is exactly what I did here to BI. However, BI does have imbedded features as well.

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   thisisoliposted 12 years ago

   For a more advenced explaination than that (And how it is used) you would probably need to do a little research.

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      Sally's Troveposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I'm not about to do that research...I'm relying on you as the expert who can tell me what I need to know in layman's terms.
      
      Meanwhile, there was a thread somewhere on HP or fb about NPR publishing "duplicate content", when in fact they were publishing the content of the news wire services they contracted with.
      
      Your testbed site is disturbing to me. Is it a site that would scrape content? Please clarify.

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         thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

         No I will be asking for people to submit duplicates of their own content.
         
         These duplicates will be canonicalized to tell Google that yes, this article is a copy, it will tell google the original source.
         
         I want to see
         
         How much value Google attributes to a site that not only tells google it is hosting duplicate work, but tells google where the original can be found.
         
         I want to see if correct article syndication gives the original articale a beneficial boost (Many SEO experts are seeing correctly syndicated work rise in the SERPs)
         
         I want to see if the article placed on the duplicate site still passes value through it's backlinks.
         
         These results have already been verified as beneficial SEO techniques by several third parties, I like to test things myself though.
         
         
         Let me clarify further
         
         This will not scrape content from other sites, people must submit their work.
         
         The Canonical URL will tell Google that the original article is the origianl article,
         
         The Canonical URL will tell Google that this page is a duplicate.
         
         This in itself can be seen as a vote to Google that the work was worth 'sharing'.
         
         If you are worried about entering this test there is certainly no requirement from anyone, but anyone interested in SEO techniques may find the data from this test valuable.

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            bgamallposted 12 years agoin reply to this

            Google knew what was original and what was duplicate without that url. So why can't they do that now?

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   Peter Hogganposted 12 years ago

   Interesting conversation, Oli, do you not suspect that G is giving a positive bias to its own properties?

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      thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

      I suspect that it's own properties may be based on the structures that are similar to what Google looks for in 'good' sites.
      
      However Google really did favor it's own properties over others - we would all be making money on Knol.  I personally have never seen much traffic on my articles or collections on a variety of accounts on Knol, I can't speak for everyone though. The panda update did nothing to change that.
      
      My list does of course not factor in Brand - which seems to be a big factor, but is more for commercial sites than a hubpages/youtube argument.
      
      I think blaming Google is a simplistic response to an algorithm update. I think they got a lot wrong in the update, but if you look objectively at the data, you can see a correlation on things that Google have admitted are more recent factors it has been focusing their algorithm on.
      
      When it comes to search relevance we all know that Google is looking for ways to Analyse how much a visitor liked the site they visited.
      
      Backlinks, social media, and even types of article syndication have all been shown to have beneficial effects to a degree.
      
      In summary, The Google company has set standards internally on what creates a good website.  The aim of the Google search engine is to find good websites. Their other web properties have also been designed to be 'good websites' because that is what people want.
      
      There are a wide range of external factors as well, but Google's popularity kind of means they have most of those in their favor as well.
      
      If anyone has any actual proof that Google is favoring itself with specific parameters in the algorithm I would lvoe to see it. But all I have seen so far is that Google follows the advice it gives to webmasters, and that it has a lot of social activity on it's services.

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    Sally's Troveposted 12 years ago

    What in heaven's name is it worth to an author to have his works go through this process with no remuneration?
    
    Just for visibility?  I can do that with a proactive link strategy.
    
    I don't get the point or the worth.
    
    On a site like HP, and some others, I retain the copyright to my stuff, and I have a concrete understanding of shared revenue.
    
    I must be missing something...why would I want to syndicate my stuff to an entity that doesn't pay up front for the rights to profit from my work?

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       White Teethposted 12 years agoin reply to this

       SEO

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       thisisoliposted 12 years agoin reply to this

       In the case of this, pure SEO.
       
       By telling google that the work is a copy I do not expect it to rank well, but I expect it to rank better than the scraped content.
       
       It should also help the original article rank better.
       
       It will also mean increased backlinks (since the article will contain the backlinks as those in the orgiinal).

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