In 2012 – you need to be more careful than this….. you may well be judged on your INTENT. Remember that. I recommend being very careful syndicating content.
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 wordpress seo 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 etcand 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 sourceAlways 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!
Ah, the power of linking to your own articles. I watched my searches fall for a particular term, so I wrote a post and linked to it, BAM. Searches back and better…
As you mentioned scraper sites very rarely last long in Google, suppose a concern folks may have is if the scraper site get’s indexed before theirs. Pulling from an RSS feed to grab content, hmm, i’d hope someone would at least has a very up to date XML file that pings Google when content is live, as with wordpress the XML sitemap generator is great for that (long as the bugger doesn’t time out). What about replacing the RSS feed link on the site to point to the feedburner link instead? On the other side of the coin, in the past with ezines, you are bound to have people reprint the article, pretty much the point of using the ezines, while in some industries, especially the finance, the dodgy folks tend to remove the author bio’s with the link and there’s not much one can do about it, besides point fingers and have some harsh words with the screen. LOL Shot for the point on the RSS footer plugin, definitely going to have a look at that fella