The Pros And Cons Of Syndicating Your WordPress Content

First, let's be clear about what syndication is. Syndication is the publishing of your original content on platforms and sites other than the place of original publication. Let's say you write an interesting and useful blog post about social media marketing and publish it on your WordPress blog. An editor with a big publisher in the social media space spots it and offers to republish it on their site. For many bloggers, especially professional writers who make a living creating content, the instinctive response would be one of: "No, write your own content," "Yes, but give me money," or "Sure, take what you want; the exposure will be great for my blog."

Each of those answers has something to it, but none of them entirely reflects the reality.

There are upsides and downsides to content syndication, but it's possible to maximize the benefits with a bit of thought. The main benefit of syndication is that it allows you to leverage someone else's audience for traffic referrals, reputation building, and exposure. The main downside is that if you don't do it properly, all of the benefits will accrue to the syndicating site and none to your site.

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Syndication Is Not Guest Blogging

The editor wants your social media piece. You agree, and so they simply copy and paste it wholesale from your blog and post it. That might sound similar to guest blogging but the crucial difference is that a guest blog is an original content created specifically for publication on that site.

Because syndicated content is identical to the content on your blog, there is considerable scope for duplicate content issues with search engines. Search engines don't like to show the same content twice for a specific search query. They'll simply drop one of the results. If the site you are syndicating to has more authority (better SEO), it's likely that it's the original post on your site that will be dropped, and you'll have given content away for nothing.

According to marketer Eric Enge, there are three main ways of mitigating this risk, of varying effectiveness.

• rel=canonical — If the syndicating site embeds a rel=canonical link to the original in their copy of the article, Google will understand which copy is the original and treat it accordingly. The problem here is that many sites will not go to the trouble of embedding a rel=canonical link.
• Noindex — The no-index robots meta tag is an instruction to search engine crawlers that ask them not to index the content.
• Attribution Link — You should always ask for a byline and an attribution link anyway, but in the absence of other methods, this at least lets readers know who should get credit for the article and gives search engines some indication of where the content originated.

In reality, you'll often end up settling for last of these options. Syndicating sites want to leverage the SEO benefits of your content — that's partially why they want to publish it in the first place — and they may well not want to syndicate at all if you insist on canonical links or no-index tags.

Deciding whether to syndicate at all is a balancing act. Are the benefits in exposure or potential traffic increases worth negatives? In many cases, yes, but you should take care to be selective about what you syndicate and where you syndicate it.

If you're interested in syndicating your content, Salma Jafri has created an excellent list of sites you might want to approach to republish your content.