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Syndicating (sharing) weblog entries among sites in MSM and repercussions on SEO w/ duplicate content..

June 26, 2008 1:03am

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  • #1 / Jun 26, 2008 1:03am

    Danny T.

    426 posts

    I was wondering if anybody can recommend the best way to syndicate/share particular entries from one site to the other? I’m not looking to stream an entire category in particular, but rather, just certain posts that I deem to “qualify” to be on the other site based on a per individual basis.

    Do you guys handle this through a custom status of something? This is kind of troublesome for me, because a weblog entry can only be one status and I already have a “Featured” status that rotates a designated image through the Cycle jQuery plugin.

    Further, the utmost important thing for me is getting the rankings as best as I can, for the original content I develop, and even for concisive pieces that I reference from other sites (though deservedly, I don’t expect to rank higher than the originals, but rather supplement it with good content).

    Brent D. Payne, who is the in-house SEO manager at Tribune, whom own 50 websites and says, “In essence we syndicate to ourselves. This is a problem for duplicate content (not to mention the canonicalization duplicate content, which I will set aside at the moment).”

    More details on this post and others regarding duplicate content can be found here.

    Solutions?

    I was thinking that for syndicated content, we would write a variation of the original post, as suggested. This would be in the form of a custom field with the objective of, well, providing an objective opinion, and spinning it with the best amount of keywords as best as possbile. Question is, what if I wanted to adapt some things from the original entry, such as tags used to associate the article? How about META descriptions, etc.?

  • #2 / Jun 26, 2008 1:55am

    kirkaracha

    273 posts

    You could use a category called “sites” with subcategories for the different sites you want the content to appear on. Then in the sites’ templates you could specify the site’s subcategory ID to pull in the content that’s been tagged for that site.

    A drawback would be that the traffic for a particular entry is diluted by the different sites it’s available on.

  • #3 / Jun 26, 2008 3:03am

    Danny T.

    426 posts

    What do you mean by “diluted”?

  • #4 / Jun 26, 2008 3:52pm

    kirkaracha

    273 posts

    If you posted the same story on example1.com and example2.com, the traffic would be split between the two sites, so you’d have to look at both sites’ traffic to see how popular the story is.

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