Larger Volume Duplicate Syndicated Content Vs Fewer Original Content On Your Blog

[Dele]

Hi All,

Which has more bite (SEO wise)?

Using "larger" number of duplicate syndicated content or "fewer" original content on your website blog.

I say "larger" and "fewer" against the background that you are unlikely to be able to produce as much original content for your blog relative to the volume of duplicate syndicated content that you can have placed on your blog.

[christopher jon]

Syndicated content isn't going to hurt your site or SEO efforts.

The problem with syndicated content that I never see mentioned is if you are expecting that content to rank, you are competing against every other site that is using the same content.

So, you are now fighting two battles. You're trying to rank those articles for keywords and you're also having to deal with your hundreds (or thousands) of cyber twins.

What it comes down to is the site with the most SEO muscle or webmasters who puts in the extra effort to help their syndicated content rise above the fray.

But with that said, you can use a large amount of syndicated traffic to pull in traffic.

[Dele]

Originally Posted by christopher jon

Syndicated content isn't going to hurt your site or SEO efforts.

Why then does Google harp on original content?

[christopher jon]

Why then does Google harp on original content?

Because they would prefer the internet to not be polluted with repeat copies of the same content. But that doesn't mean it's going to hurt your site.

[Dele]

Originally Posted by christopher jon

Because they would prefer the internet to not be polluted with repeat copies of the same content. But that doesn't mean it's going to hurt your site.

But don't you think since that is what Google would prefer, it would naturally favor those who do that and "penalize" those who go against that.

As an example, Google rejects landing pages for Google Adwords quite often simply because such pages are not comprised of original content.

[paulgl]

Google does not harp on original content.

They harp on providing useful content to your visitors.

Neither syndicated content nor original has an advantage if
one were to target appropriately. It comes with authority.
New sites have a tough time, just because of the authority
factor.

That's why LA times does an AP article and gets #1, even
though same article is on AP. And 99% of the other newspaper
and news sites have the same thing. You could say the same thing
for NY times, Reuters, etc. At any given point in time, any site
in the mix could be #1.

It's not about original or not. It's about what one has done to their
site to make google think it's the site of the moment. For a new site,
that may take time, original content or not.

Choose whichever content you want and get visitors to value you.
Seems like I say this more now: That's the way google says to do it!

Paul

[cashcow]

Syndicated content isn't going to hurt your site or SEO efforts.

Exactly, which is why you can do BOTH! Put original content on there and syndicated content - doesn't have to be either or.

Lee

[Dele]

What do you think of this from the horse's mouth

"Scraped content: Some webmasters make use of content taken from other, more reputable sites on the assumption that increasing the volume of web pages with random, irrelevant content is a good long-term strategy. Purely scraped content, even from high-quality sources, may not provide any added value to your users without additional useful services or content provided by your site. It's worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results. "

Again from the horse's mouth

To conclude, I'd like to point out that in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out. If you check out some of the tips mentioned in the resources above, you'll basically learn how to have greater control about what exactly we're crawling and indexing and which versions are more likely to appear in the index. Only when there are signals pointing to deliberate and malicious intent, occurrences of duplicate content might be considered a violation of the webmaster guidelines.

N.B. Emphasis is mine