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
-
Help finding website content scraping
Hi, I need a tool to help me review sites that are plagiarising / directly copying content from my site. But tools that I'm aware, such as Copyscape, appear to work with individual URLs and not a root domain. That's great if you have a particular post or page you want to check. But in this case, some sites are scraping 1000s of product pages. So I need to submit the root domain rather than an individual URL. In some cases, other sites are being listed in SERPs above or even instead of our site for product search terms. But so far I have stumbled across this, rather than proactively researched offending sites. So I want to insert my root domain & then for the tool to review all my internal site pages before providing information on other domains where an individual page has a certain amount of duplicated copy. Working in the same way as Moz crawls the site for internal duplicate pages - I need a list of duplicate content by domain & URL, externally that I can then contact the offending sites to request they remove the content and send to Google as evidence, if they don't. Any help would be gratefully appreciated. Terry
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MFCommunications0 -
Social engineering content detected
hello, i have Got Social engineering content detected Message on webmaster tools on my around 20 sites, i have checked on server cleared, all unnecessary folders, But still i am not getting rectified this issue. One more error i got is Remove the deceptive content, But there is no any content on website which can harm my site, so kindly help & tell us steps we need take to resolve this issue, i am facing it from 10 days, yet not able to resolve, thnx in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rohitiepl0 -
Having a Size Chart and Personalization Descriptions on each page - Duplicate Content?
Hi everyone, I am coding a Shopify Store theme currently and we want to show customers the size comparisons and personalization options for each product. It will be a great UX addition since it is the number one & two things asked via customer support. But my only concern is that Google might flag it as duplicate content since it will be visible on each product page. What are your thoughts and/or suggestions? Thank you so much in advance.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MadeByBrew0 -
Separate Servers for Humans vs. Bots with Same Content Considered Cloaking?
Hi, We are considering using separate servers for when a Bot vs. a Human lands on our site to prevent overloading our servers. Just wondering if this is considered cloaking if the content remains exactly the same to both the Bot & Human, but on different servers. And if this isn't considered cloaking, will this affect the way our site is crawled? Or hurt rankings? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Desiree-CP0 -
Noindexing Thin Content Pages: Good or Bad?
If you have massive pages with super thin content (such as pagination pages) and you noindex them, once they are removed from googles index (and if these pages aren't viewable to the user and/or don't get any traffic) is it smart to completely remove them (404?) or is there any valid reason that they should be kept? If you noindex them, should you keep all URLs in the sitemap so that google will recrawl and notice the noindex tag? If you noindex them, and then remove the sitemap, can Google still recrawl and recognize the noindex tag on their own?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Am I Syndicating Content Correctly?
My question is about how to syndicate content correctly. Our site has professionally written content aimed toward our readers, not search engines. As a result, we have other related websites who are looking to syndicate our content. I have read the Google duplicate content guidelines (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en), canonical recommendations (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375), and no index recommendation (https://developers.google.com/webmasters/control-crawl-index/docs/robots_meta_tag) offered by Google, but am still a little confused about how to proceed. The pros in our opinion are as follows:#1 We can gain exposure to a new audience as well as help grow our brand #2 We figure its also a good way to help build up credible links and help our rankings in GoogleOur initial reaction is to have them use a "canonical link" to assign the content back to us, but also implement a "no index, follow" tag to help avoid duplicate content issues. Are we doing this correctly, or are we potentially in threat of violating some sort of Google Quality Guideline?Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Dirving4Success0 -
Negative SEO attack working amazingly on Google.ca
We have a client www.atvandtrailersales.com who recently (March) fell out of the rankings. We checked their backlink file and found over 100 spam links pointing at their website with terms like "uggboots" and "headwear" etc. etc. I submitted a disavow link file, as this was obviously an attack on the website. Since the recent Panda update, the client is back out of the rankings for a majority of keyword phrases. The disavow link file that was submitted back in march has 90% of the same links that are still spamming the website now. I've sent a spam report to Google and nothing has happened. I could submit a new disavow link file, but I'm not sure if this is worth the time. '.'< --Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SmartWebPros1 -
Google penalty having bad sites maybe and working on 1 good site ?!!!
I have a list of websites that are not spam.. there are ok sites... just that I need to work on the conent again as the sites content might not be useful for users at 100%. There are not bad sites with spammy content... just that I want to rewrite some of the content to really make great websites... the goal would be to have great content to get natual links and a great user experience.. I have 40 sites... all travel sites related to different destinations around the world. I also have other sites that I haven't worked on for some time.. here are some sites: www.simplyparis.org
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sandyallain
www.simplymadrid.org
www.simplyrome.org etc... Again there are not spam sites but not as useful as they coul become... I want to work on few sites only to see how it goes.... will this penalise my sites that I am working on if I have other sites with average content or not as good ? I want to make great content good for link bait 🙂0