When dealing with content syndication, one is occasionally in the situation where you are not the higher ranking site in search engines. You might rank #4 for an article and in that same search, your syndicated content may be ranked #1. What’s the best way to deal with this?
After much reading and discussion, I believe that you have a few options.
The first is taking advantage of the most recent addition to the cross-domain rel=canonical link element. You can read up on it more here. If you can talk to the publishing group and get them to allow the addition of the canonical link relationship, then you will get credit where credit is due (and deserved).
The reason that this can sometimes be an issue is that a lot of SEO types are not comfortable with when and how to use this link relationship and over use it or point it to their homepage for more link juice. That’s not the idea here. The idea is to prevent duplicate content from being index and to allot credit to the deserving party.
The second is to try to take advantage of the syndicate publishing networks credibility and publish a blurb at the bottom of every article. Look at the bottom of every CNET article as an example. There is a blurb about every author with a link. That link could be to the author’s site or to an author’s bio page.
Lastly, you need to make sure that the article links back to your site. This is again taking advantage of the link juice and credibility that the higher ranking site can bring to your natural search ranking.
