We deliver syndicated content to our clients' sites. In our articles, we often link to blogs. We recently received a complaint from a blog that our link to them hurt their Google ranking, likely because of the way we publish our content:
- content is duplicated across multiple client sites (it's syndicated, after all)
- ~300 instances of the article go live at the same time (published as soon as articles are ready)
- articles are typically less than 1,000 characters (to make for shorter, more "snackable" content)
- articles contain numerous links to other sources (they are usually fashion articles referencing multiple examples of one trend or another)
- we do not publish a canonical version of the articles (as a B2B vendor, we do not have a consumer-facing outlet for our content)
We do not plan to change the first four conditions, as they serve our business needs. However, we are considering creating an article feed on our corporate domain in order to provide a canonical source for each article. What impact would this have on the way Google sees our content?
Our client sites contain authoritative and unique content. However, syndicated may comprise a little over half of client site content. How would this move to create a canonical feed on our domain impact our client sites?
Note!
Each instance of an article on a site is canonical in terms of sharing on Facebook. So, if I share an article from xyz.com, the link would go to xyz.com/articles/title-123. The same article shared from abc.com would go to abc.com/articles/title-123. Whatever we do must not interfere with that schema.