You will see a lot of people bemoaning other people nicking their content and using it to power crappy spam sites plastered with Adsense. While this is a real concern, generally speaking I don’t mind people republishing my content (on this site anyway – hey it’s creative commons seo anyway) as long as they link back to the original article.

Syndicating via RSS is a great way of adding links to your link profile, and driving traffic to your site.

ALWAYS link to other articles on your blog in an article you write, even if it’s just spam blogs that are scraping your content.

If you are using Wordpress, use a plugin like Joost De Valk’s RSS Footer plugin, which places a link back to your article in the footer of your RSS feed so when people nick your feed they are linkbuilding to your site, which is nice.

The possibilitities with RSS syndication (if you are a content provider) are frightening, in terms of linkbuilding and instant promotion when syndicated to places picked up by Google news.

I’ve done quite a bit of this over the last year especially.

  • ENSURE you’re feed is pinging Google Blog search, pingomatic and preferably feedburner etc
  • and ensure the feed has links back to the original article, because ultimately you want Google to recognise your content on your site as the original source
  • Always link to other pages on your site in any article – you should be doing this anyway!
  • If I am desperate to make sure my site is definitely the first site Google picks the content up on, I’ll hit publish, go to Feedburner, sync my feed in Troublehootize and pull it in in my Feedreader just to be sure Google knows exactly where it found it first.

Some time ago I did a quick test with an article on another site. Before I hit publish, there was no exact match in Google or Yahoo for the exact title of the article. Now, there’s still 127,000 mentions of the article in Yahoo. A month ago there was over 300,000 mentions of the article.

All I did was publish a blog article.

Syndicating your content is good news if you know what you’re doing so practice a bit – results vary of course :)

PS – Never, ever, ever link back to the sites syndicating your feeds, in case Google decides it actually is just a scraper site.

One other thing to note – while these sites can send you traffic and link back to you, their whole aim is to get people to their site and usually you’ll find them plastered with distractions to keep them from cicking through to your site.

In the end, it depends on your intent and how compelling your call to visit the original site is. You do control that!

Did you know when you link to a Hobo SEO post we have search engine friendly links back to your site if approved? Our comments are also search engine friendly you know (once you've commented on a few posts)! Do you need any more encouragement to get involved in the conversation ;)