By Meg Archer, SEM Specialist
When a site links to you, what do you do? 90 gives advice on how to create a linking strategy that is beneficial to your SEO plan as a whole.
To implement a strong SEO strategy, businesses must create a relevant linking strategy. To be most effective, sometimes businesses or agencies must use another site to syndicate content. As is often the case with third-party listings, this relationship can get tricky. But, if you follow some simple rules, your site will reap the benefits of well planned and executed SEO and linking strategies.
Most obviously, if your content is syndicated on a partner site, ensure it links to your original article. Simon Heseltine, director of SEO at AOL Inc. and writer for Search Engine Watch, supports this recommendation. “This tells the search engines the location of the original, after they determine its duplicate content.” If the syndicate includes a link back to your original content, not simply your homepage, this will build credibility for your site.
However, it is important not to have a link to the syndication on your site because this creates reciprocal linking. We strongly recommend against reciprocal linking because it often comes from link farms, is inorganic and can negatively impact your site ranking in search results.
A second step to optimizing syndicated content in your linking strategy is to allow your partner to publish only a limited amount of content. Heseltine wrote in his article “Is Syndication Killing your Rankings? An 8 Point SEO Inspection,” that putting limits on the amount of content published is a great way to ensure that the partner site links back to your article. You can also ask the site to add a noindex meta tag so that the listing is excluded from rankings by search engines. This will diminish the competition between your original content and the content linked on your partner’s site.
Over the years, 90octane has successfully created and implemented relevant linking strategies that positively impact our client’s websites and SEO strategies. We have found that the best way to ensure a beneficial relationship with a syndicate is to examine a client’s site thoroughly and evaluate where and how content is being re-published. If the relationship positively impacts the website and SEO strategy, great, keep up the team work. If not, re-examine the partnership and make some changes for the better.
