Working for a large company with popular brands we’ve been approached multiple times by brand stewards with the question/request regarding the syndication of the site’s content.   It is understandable why this would be appealing for the business.  Syndication on a major portal can bring in additional revenue, increase brand awareness, and increase site traffic.  But unchecked these content syndication deals can end up doing more harm than good from a SEO standpoint.

If the partner site has more authority than the source site and/or the source site isn’t optimized as well it is very possible that the syndicated content will outrank the source site and draw traffic away from the source site.   Even though it is a duplicate.  Yes, that’s right, even though it is duplicate content it can still outrank the original document.

Yahoo! is a great example of how content syndication can hurt your site in the engines.  Almost all of the content on Yahoo.com, and the auto section specifically, is syndicated content from partners like Car & Driver, Forbes Autos, Consumer Reports, etc..  Yet the team at Yahoo does a good job optimizing their site and they have a ton of authority.  End result?  In many cases you’ll see Yahoo’s syndicated version outranking the original version which could mean less search engine referrals for the source sites.  Here’s one example I came across:

• Original Article at Forbes
• Syndicated/Duplicate Article on Yahoo
  
• Current Rankings for target keyword “Highest-Quality Luxury Cars”:
  • Original article = not in the top 50 of Google, #2 in Yahoo
  • Yahoo version = #2 in Google, #3 in Yahoo

There are a few things that can be done.

1)  Forbes could do a better job optimizing their site.   Currently Yahoo has them beat in a heads up competition.
2)  Forbes could stipulate that the syndicated content displayed on Yahoo.com be blocked via <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”> tag or the robots.txt.

The partner sites may not go for blocking search engine indexing but it is important to protect your quality content, assets, rankings, and traffic.