Question:
On our blog, are we using RSS syndication? I went to a social media seminar, and they talked about how great RSS syndication was. My blog uses RSS, right?
Answer:
“RSS Syndication” as that seminar meant it is not something your blog does for you. What your blog does for you is…
A blog spreads the word using an RSS feed
You have a wordpress blog, so all your posts go out in an RSS feed. That’s just the programming language used by one and all blogs. When the blog updates the feed, it lets the search engines know there is a new post by pinging, sending a tiny signal to another computer – a “Ping!”. Blogs and blog search engines have a long standing “ping” system left over from the early days of IT even. Super geeky stuff there. Anyway, this is how search engines can get blog posts up and indexed so quickly. You press “publish”, then the RSS feed gets updated, they get pinged, the blog search engine races over to the site, collects the RSS feed and adds that new post to its index. Sometimes before you’ve had time to get up and stretch after writing your post. I’ve seen new posts on extremely popular blogs make it into the actual search results within a few minutes.
All the services, directories and search engines that you may have registered the blog with should get pings. There are some extra fancy “ping” plugins for this that work beautifully.
But “RSS feeds” are not “RSS Syndication” as that seminar meant it.
RSS for article syndication is a horse of a different color
A lot of people use the term “RSS Syndication” to mean “article syndication” or “article marketing”. RSS is a misnomer here only in that RSS is just the code, the programming language that your post is communicated in. RSS doesn’t magically do other things than sit there waiting for you to apply “elbow grease” – hard work and determination.
So, I believe what this seminar referred to is actually “Article Syndication” – the blog author becoming a syndicated author of web content for other sites.
What this would be is signing up – as an author and with the blog as the source – for syndication through an article syndication service that relies on RSS feeds. Then, from that point on, his articles published on his own blog would also go out on the wire to other sites for placement on their pages if they want.
That has its pros and cons.
Upside of syndicating posts as articles:
- Readership – Your articles get seen more in general by real people – this plus can be a very big plus if your content shines or is extremely engaging or unique.
- Branding – getting your name out there. Getting your name and the website’s URL shown on other sites has a limited value for some businesses but a very big value to others.
- Helping page rank – this kind of thing can generate lots of inbound links from other sites to deep content. This can help generate a higher page rank for the website in general over time, although there is much debate over the length of time a link on another blog has value – blogs being so very chronological in nature.
- Attracting new visitors – Someone reading the article on another site might possibly click a link over to your site, if you put one there. Expect a temporary boost from article syndication of a few days duration per article posted on a pagerank 2 or above site. The larger the site that it’s syndicated on, the larger the boost. The more often they add fresh posts on that site, the shorter the duration of the boost, unless they keep a link to your post somewhere prominent on their site.
Downside of syndicating posts as articles:
- Twisting your words – Possibly the other site may modify your articles and there’s nothing you can do about it. It happens often enough that the other guy modifies your article while still leaving it attributed to you. Or changes the attribution so it looks like he wrote it. Malicious or not, reputable syndication services work hard to protect your copyright – but not everyone reads the fine print. And getting it changed back can be a pain, if not impossible.
- Apparency of Duplicate Content – Only one instance of that article will make it into search results. Will it be your blog page or the other guy’s page? Who knows which version the search engines will choose? It’s a crap shoot.
- Frozen Words – You cannot edit later if needed – it’s on someone else’s site. If your information suddenly becomes outdated, you can’t fix it later or remove the post – it’s not yours anymore, even if legally it is. In actual practice, it’s extremely hard to get content changed once it’s “out there”.
- Bad Neighborhood – Possibly getting your article and name associated with SPAM. Throwaway SPAM sites love to use article syndication services to pretend they have lots of content in a hurry. If your article ends up out there for syndication, you will very likely end up associated to some degree with some dubious websites you’d normally avoid being associated with in any way…
If you want to start syndicating your articles, there are precautions that must be taken to ensure that your articles remain “yours”:
- You should install a plugin to pop an author box on to the end of each post and another that places links in the content of every syndicated post so that they are harder to pass off as original content elsewhere.
- If you’re worried about the duplicate content issue, there is a solution. You can use a unique and separate category on your blog just for the articles you’ve chosen to syndicate, and do not mix your syndicated content with your normal blog posts. You can make that category never display on the regular blog, just syndicate out to the article marketing service. That does require a little set up to get operational, but would ensure the blog didn’t even run the risk of appearing to be duplicate content. But it also requires writing a lot more content than you are right now.Reputable automated article syndication services are not usually cheap. They generally have a monthly fee, and the cheap or free ones require manual submission, usually. I can make recommendations if needed.
———–
If this question means “Are we displaying syndicated content on the blog?” then that has a different answer. No. Only your own posts are displaying there, unless you intentionally have signed up to show syndicated content, which you would know if you had.
Desi