Truemors
Syndicated content: Why do I get Needs Improvement on a post copied from my blog?
Syndication is the re-publishing of an article that has also been published at other sites (or will also be published at other sites). It does not matter if you wrote the article you are re-publishing... if it is anywhere else on the web and you copy it here it you are syndicating content.
Duplicate Content on User Gen Sites
NowPublic is not a syndication site. We provide members with a Highlight Tool that helps them effectively redistribute selected portions, known as snippets, of their outside posts while clearly giving attribution to the original. If you can not use the Highlight Tool for whatever reason there is a very simple piece of code that can be used in its place and any member of staff will be happy to show you how to make it work.
Syndication hazards from the mouth of Matt Cutts of Google:
However, I would be mindful that taking all your articles and submitting them for syndication all over the place can make it more difficult to determine how much the site wrote its own content vs. just used syndicated content. My advice would be 1) to avoid over-syndicating the articles that you write, and 2) if you do syndicate content, make sure that you include a link to the original content. That will help ensure that the original content has more PageRank, which will aid in picking the best documents in our index.
When highlighting anything, something you wrote or just something you like, you must add value in the form of an original commentary or introduction so that NP will not suffer from the "duplicate content" issue that syndication presents. This original commentary or introduction must be unique to NP and can not appear as an introduction to your story at any other site.
To avoid "duplicate content" purgatory you should never highlight a full article or full copy of your article from another web page. Highlight is intended to showcase carefully selected portions (snippets) of other articles, not to frame an entire reprint. Again, it does not matter if you wrote the original, search engines have no way to tell that you are the original author other than proper attribution via a link like the one automatically provided by our Highlight Tool (or the manual code).
NowPublic encourages members to write their pieces as 50% original content to 50% Highlighted text.
Before the Web 2.0/blogger era web writers syndicated the same story across multiple platforms with the intent of making their work available to as many different audiences as possible. This practice, which was once beneficial, is now extremely detrimental, not only to NP but also to your blog. NP has a fairly high authority with search engines and the NP version of a syndicated story is highly likely to outplace your original blog post in search engines. Also, by hosting purely syndicated content at NP we risk becoming known as a "scraper site," something that is not at all positive for the community as a whole.
Please see the following for more details:
How to effectively link to sources and why Highlight is so great
Pulling in Images via Highlights
Highlight Tool
If after reading the various forum posts and site guidelines listed above you feel you need further help understanding please feel free to post a question here or PM a member of staff, but know that when it comes to syndication the expectation that Highlight be used as described above is not a "new rule."
Thanks! Tina
