Syndicating News Content on Aged Domain

[harrytwatter]

We've all seen syndicated content bring in traffic for multiple domains, but it is usually a small portion of said domains total published content. Those sites that get traffic for syndicating also usually have super high authority metrics and are often in Google news/syndicated themselves.

My question is: Let's say you have hyper industry relevant domain that's been aging since 2013. It has <10 articles that have just been sitting. Would this site potentially benefit from syndicating new industry news/content?

Naturally publishing 100% unique juicy long form "good stuff" would be optimal, but pretend for this scenario you are extremely budget restricted.

So, in quick summary, you have an industry relevant (partial match) domain, aged sitting with some (<10 pages) unique content and no budget. Do you:
A) do nothing, keep letting it sit until you can afford to build out unique researched content or
B) set up some RSS and re-publish industry news/updates (including original source citation/crediting)

 

[funlol]

I would go with option A. Using syndicated content on a domain without much authority seems like a good way for it to disappear from serps. Keep aging it and adding content.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@harrytwatter, I agree. @dzianis had a lot to say about this recently, he might chime in if he has the time. He's right that syndicating content can expose a lot of amazing keywords your domain is ready to rank for that you wouldn't have otherwise found.

But I agree with @funlol as well that without much authority, the amount of terms you'll rank for are going to be limited. Why should Google rank your version of the syndicated content for any term over the original post, if you have less authority. I'd go with option A. If you want to do option B for the learning experience, I'd do it on a new domain (since you said 'budget restricted').

 

[dzianis]

syndicating content can expose a lot of amazing keywords your domain is ready to rank for that you wouldn't have otherwise found

yeah, here is that how-to just in case someone comes across this thread later

industry relevant (partial match) domain, aged sitting with some (<10 pages) unique content and no budget.

I'd actually go for option B - set up some automatic news to be re-posted on the site.

BUT - I'd make sure that the 10 long-form articles are still the focus of your website. They should be on your homepage and in all the most visible elements of navigation.

The syndicated news, on the other hand, should be clearly defined as such. That is, coming to a certain category (e.g. "Industry news"), with the category description openly stating you're syndicating content, always link back to the source and mention authors, etc.

Here's a couple of benefits to that approach:

- new content gets bots crawling your site often
- industry-related content boosts your domain relevance further
- you get keyword ideas which rain on you and motivate you to create genuine articles more often
- you get more pages (the auto news posts) to place internal links to your "money" articles
- indexing power - having several thousand pages in index is never bad
- unexpected perks like startups and small companies including links to your site to their "in the press" sections with the news articles you'll re-publish

This will exactly let your domain "age" as you want with option A, but age in relevance and growing with indexed pages.

I've checked this lately with a similar site - it publishes both original articles and syndicated news into a separate category. The news syndication was on for about a year, then I started doubting and turned it off for about 1 month. There were no improvements as a result. If anything, the organic rankings went a bit down, just because those indexed pages and internal links stopped coming in. I turned the news back on and never looked back.

 

[harrytwatter]

Thanks for the thoughtful replies guys! (or gals!)
I think I'll give this a shot, get the syndicated stuff to be hyper niche relevant, add another 4-5 big pages to the existing handful, and see what happens!

Any recommendations for Wordpress syndication plugins? I can't code so finding something that allows for a bit of control in posting (volume, frequency, etc) would be super useful.