Syndicated content outperforming our hard work!
-
Our company (FindMyAccident) is an accident news site. Our goal is to roll our reporting out to all 50 states; currently, we operate full-time in 7 states.
To date, the largest expenditure is our writing staff. We hire professional
journalists who work with police departments and other sources to develop written
content and video for our site. Our visitors also contribute stories and/or
tips that add to the content on our domain. In short, our content/media is 100% original.A site that often appears alongside us in the SERPs in the markets where we work full-time is accidentin.com. They are a site that syndicates accident news and offers little original content. (They also allow users to submit their own accident stories, and the entries index quickly and are sometimes viewed by hundreds of people in the same day. What's perplexing is that these entries are isolated incidents that have little to no media value, yet they do extremely well.)
(I don't rest my bets with Quantcast figures, but accidentin does use their pixel sourcing and the figures indicate that they are receiving up to 80k visitors a day in some instances.)
I understand that it's common to see news sites syndicate from the AP, etc., and traffic accident news is not going to have a lot of competition (in most instances), but the real shocker is that accidentin will sometimes appear as the first or second result above the original sources???
The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?
Are they bound to fade away?
While looking at their model, I'm wondering if we're not silly to syndicate news in the states where we don't have actual staff? It would seem we could attract more traffic by setting up syndication in our vacant states.
OR
Is our competitor's site bound to fade away?
Thanks, gang, hope all of you have a great 2013!
Wayne
-
Basically, Google treats Syndicated content and duplicate content differently. So, if the competitor you are talking about is following the best practices for syndicated content and if Google sees their website or webpage to be more prominent (Because of more relevant/ related contents on that domain, SEO optimization or popularity etc.) and more relevant (Than the original creator of the content or the other syndication partners), in relation to the keywords searched for , then Google will show the content on that particular syndication partner's page (in this situation the competitor you are talking about) rather than that of original creator's page.And, no, as long as they are following the best practices for syndicated content, they won't have any problem. But, it could happen that in the future some other content syndication partner might be given more prominence over the other, if that page on that website has leveraged the content better or even the original creator might given more prominence if they do a good job at optimizing their syndicated content strategy.
As far as syndicated content goes, Google says this:
“If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you’d prefer.”
So, in a nut shell...there are no penalties for properly syndicated content, but, just the fact that Google will decide which page to display based on it's prominence and best practices. But, yeah, if they are not following the best practices for content syndication, then, Google will start to see them as duplicate pages, and, then it is a different story.
BTW, here is a post that will be of help to you which talks about how the original creators of the content can leverage it:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/06/28/content-creators-benefit-from-new-seo/
-
"The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?"
Your hard work.
Stop allowing them to use your content and they should not appear in your SERPs.
-
The question: does anyone have a guess as to what is making it perform so well?
You have a stronger link profile but I think they are winning the SERPs because they post "Recent" links on their homepage that link to news and user submissions. This in turn lets crawlers syndicate the latest submissions quicker, their homepage is crawled more often, and they rank quicker/better because of the Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) factor.
I recommend you try doing the same thing and see if that helps you.
--
I also only found 5 instances of your articles being sourced - https://www.google.com/search?q=site:accidentin.com+intext%3Afindmyaccident.com
What kinds of kw are they outranking you for? Do you have a rss feed or how are they scraping you content?
--
In general, scraper sites are not supposed to do well and will probably lose value but I've seen several examples where they are performing really well.
Cheers & Good Luck,
Oleg
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Posting same content multiple blogs or multiple website - 2018
Submitting same content on multiple site or blog using original source Links. Its good or bad in term on Ranking and SEO. Can we post same content on multiple website with orginal post reference same like Press release site technique.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Are bloggs published on blog platforms and on our own site be considered duplicate content?
Hi, SEO wizards! My company has a company blog on Medium (https://blog.scratchmm.com/). Recently, we decided to move it to our own site to drive more traffic to our domain (https://scratchmm.com/blog/). We re-published all Medium blogs to our own website. If we keep the Medium blog posts, will this be considered duplicate content and will our website rankings we affected in any way? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Scratch_MM0 -
Duplicate content warning: Same page but different urls???
Hi guys i have a friend of mine who has a site i noticed once tested with moz that there are 80 duplicate content warnings, for instance Page 1 is http://yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html the warning page is http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/signing-documents.html another example Page 1 http://www.yourdigitalfile.com/ same second page http://yourdigitalfile.com i noticed that the whole website is like the nealry every page has another version in a different url?, any ideas why they dev would do this, also the pages that have received the warnings are not redirected to the newer pages you can go to either one??? thanks very much
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ydf0 -
Guest post linking only to good content
Hello, We're thinking of doing guest posting of the following type: 1. The only link is in the body of the guest post pointing to our most valuable article. 2. It is not a guest posting site - we approached them to help with content, they don't advertise guest posting. They sometimes use guest posting if it's good content. 3. It is a clean site - clean design, clean anchor text profile, etc. We have 70 linking root domains. We want to use the above tactics to add 30 more links. Is this going to help us on into the future of Google (We're only interested in long term)? Is 30 too many? Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
[linkbuilding] link partner page on webshop, is it working?
Hello Mozzers, I am wondering about the effect of link building by swapping links between websites and adding a link partner page to the web shop containing hundreds of links. I have this new competitor coming in to the SERP of Google competing on the keywords I am targeting. The competitor has way more links than our web shop. The competitor has a page with hundreds of links to other web shops witch on there turn has a link to there web shop. (not all off them link back btw) I always thought it is no use sharing links with other websites this way in creating a huge page with hundreds of links. it is of no benefit for neighter website to do this. Still it does seems to work (?) and tis strategy is used by a lot of web shops in the Netherlands. How are you guys looking at this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | auke1810
Witch of you guy's are using strategy like this?
Should I pick up this strategy myself?0 -
Old SPAM tactic still works and gets TOP 3 in SERP?
Hi Mozers, Below you can see some examples of spam ( hidden text and sneaky redirects) which are in SERP for our branded keywords during last 3 months. Some of them occupy very high position in SERP (top 3/top5). https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&safe=off&biw=1883&bih=1028&q=%22your+mac+-%22%2B%22cleanmymac%22 I sent spam reports and I’m going to continue doing so. (~500 spam reports from personal and work google account) I contacting directly with some of the hacked sites (web-masters) and tried to help them to fix this issue, but it takes a lot of my time. But 3 months!? Can you give me any advice, what doing next? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MacPaw0 -
Duplicate Content due to Panda update!
I can see that a lot of you are worrying about this new Panda update just as I am! I have such a headache trying to figure this one out, can any of you help me? I have thousands of pages that are "duplicate content" which I just can't for the life of me see how... take these two for example: http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=18753 http://www.eteach.com/Employer.aspx?EmpNo=31241 My campaign crawler is telling me these are duplicate content pages because of the same title (which that I can see) and because of the content (which I can't see). Can anyone see how Google is interpreting these two pages as duplicate content?? Stupid Panda!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eteach_Marketing0 -
Content box (on page content) and titles Google over-optimization penalty?
We have a content box at the bottom of our website with a scroll bar and have posted a fair bit of content into this area (too much for on page) granted it is a combination of SEO content (with links to our pages) and informative but with the over optimization penalty coming around I am a little scared if this will result in a problem for us. I am thinking of adopting the process of this website HERE with the content behind a more information button that drops down, would this be better as it could be much more organised and we will be swopping out to more helpful information than the current 50/50 (SEO – helpful content) or will it be viewed the same and we might as well leave it as is and lower the amount of repetition and links in the content. Also we sell printed goods so our titles may be a bit over the top but they are bring us a lot of converting traffic but again I am worried about the new Google release this is an example of a typical title (only an example not our product page) Banner Printing | PVC Banners | Outdoor Banners | Backdrops | Vinyl Banners | Banner Signs Thank you for any help with these matters.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0